National Science Foundation establishes a partnership to advance throughput computing

By Brian Mattmiller, Morgridge Institute for Research

Recognizing the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s leadership role in research computing, the National Science Foundation announced this month that the Madison campus will be home to a five-year, $22.5 million initiative to advance high-throughput computing.

The Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) is driven by the growing need for throughput computing across the entire spectrum of research institutions and disciplines. The partnership will advance computing technologies and extend adoption of these technologies by researchers and educators.

The partnership will focus on distributed high throughput computing (dHTC) technologies and methodology. These tools leverage automation and build on distributed computing principles to enable researchers with large ensembles of computational tasks to effectively harness the computing capacity of thousands of computers assembled in a network. Such projects that might require decades to complete with conventional computing will achieve results within days or hours, by distributing the tasks across this massive network.

Miron Livny, UW-Madison computer science professor and Morgridge Institute for Research chief technology officer, will lead the PATh project, which brings together the UW-Madison Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC, located within the College of Letters & Science) and the national Open Science Grid (OSG) consortium. Researchers and staff from the University of Southern California, Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the University of Nebraska and the University of California-San Diego will join forces in this project with the Madison team that will involve researchers and staff from the Department of Computer Sciences (part of the College of Letters & Science’s new School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences) and the Morgridge Institute for Research.