BLOOMINGTON, IND.—Indiana University’s Center for Advanced Cybersecurity Research (CACR) will provide a team to secure a $22.5 million initiative to advance distributed high throughput computing, or dHTC, as part of the Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh).
Funded by the National Science Foundation, PATh brings together the Center for High Throughput Computing and the Open Science Grid to advance the nation’s campuses and science communities through the use of distributed high throughput computing, or dHTC.
High throughput computing 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 ensembles that might require decades to complete with conventional computing will provide results within days or hours, by distributing the tasks across this massive network.
The CACR team brings its history of providing cybersecurity for research and science to bear. CACR leads Trusted CI: The NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, and the Research Security Operations Center, the NSF-funded collaborative security response center. Other CACR projects have included the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High-Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP), the Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP), and the Scientific Workflow Integrity with Pegasus (SWIP) project.
Helping to secure PATh’s throughput computing is critical to securing the project’s essential science and research. This new initiative is clearly a priority for the NSF and we at CACR are very pleased to offer our expertise to help keep it secure.
Von Welch, CACR director
CACR will receive approximately $428K in funding over five years. Senior security analyst Mike Stanfield will lead the cybersecurity team, which includes senior security analysts Zalak Shah, Josh Drake, and Adrian Crenshaw.
“CACR provides the operational security team for the Open Science Grid,” said Stanfield. “The responsibilities of that team include the development and maintenance of security tools; operation of our program of security exercises; providing security-related training and support to OSG personnel; participating in incident response; providing architectural and technological review to OSG services and software; monitoring OSG services and software for security issues; and creation, review, and updates to OSG security policy. Essentially our work is to help ensure that the Open Science Grid (and PATh) infrastructure and services are secure to enable dHTC.”
“Helping to secure PATh’s throughput computing is critical to securing the project’s essential science and research,” said CACR Director Von Welch. “This new initiative is clearly a priority for the NSF and we at CACR are very pleased to offer our expertise to help keep it secure.”
The PATh project 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 University of Wisconsin-Madison will be home to the five-year PATh initiative. The $22.5 million award will fund more than 40 individuals across participating institutions.
Read the full PATh news release >>
