The SCENZ-Grid project

This post is to provide the briefest intro to the SCENZ-Grid project whichI lead and which will be the context for many future blog posts. Core SCENZ-Grid team members include Niels Hoffmann, Stephen Campbell and Chris McDowall all from Landcare Research and Ben Morrison and Paul Grimwood from GNS Science. There is also a growing number of colleagues at other institutes round the world who I will refer to as the blog evolves. More SCENZ-Grid info can be found at:

• SCENZ-Grid home on the SEEGrid twiki: check it out for some project background and explore some of the Australian SEEGrid & Auscope related work that SCENZ-Grid depends on elsewhere on the twiki - many thanks Robert Woodcock and others in your team,
• pilot SCENZ-Grid demo hosted on Bestgrid: have a look at our first geospatial web-service workflow and check out the BestGrid community who we are collaborating with - many thanks to Mark Gahegan, Nick Jones and the BestGrid team,
• SCENZ-Grid on the KAREN wiki: KAREN is the NZ 10GB/s research network and KAREN's operators REANNZ provided the seed funding for SCENZ-Grid, so check the rest of the KAREN wiki for other NZ projects using KAREN.

SCENZ-Grid and its context have been described in a number of presentations recently:

• at GOVIS: 'Reusing Digital Information - Landcare Research': live video of 50min presentation using Google Earth as presentation tool from May 2nd,
• at eFramework: 'GIS in NZ' ppt that I presented at the workshop on July 24th,
• at APAN26: Niels presented in the Natural Resources session on Aug 6th and I presented in the Middleware session on Aug 7th.

SCENZ-Grid's own hardware was delivered in late July and is being assembled while I blog. Of course it arrived just as different key members set off on various conference and annual leave trips, so it is likely to be late October before SCENZ-Grid is operating on its own hardware and in its own web-space. For those interested in specs, the hardware is an SGI cluster comprising one XE250 2U head node and six XE320 1U compute nodes, delivering 104 cores, 0.4TB RAM and 1.6TB of local /tmp. The cluster will have be connected to KAREN and have dual fibre access to our SUN StorageTek SAN for persistant storage, comprising approx 20TB in the first instance.