Past Meeting

Thursday, June 20 - Brad Calder of Entropia, Inc. and Associate Professor of UCSD

Architecture of the Entropia Desktop Grid System and Applications in Life Sciences

Time and Location: 6:30PM at the San Diego office of Sun Microsystems in theUTC area at 9540 Towne Center Drive, Building SAN05.

The meeting is free and open to the public. For more information, call (858) 452-8701.

To RSVP, e-mail us or call (858) 452-8701. Please RSVP by June 18th.

Abstract:

Desktop PC Grids (or distributed computing) have the potential to deliver dramatic increases (100x) in computing power and disk bandwidth. This potential has been demonstrated in public "volunteer" projects involving 10,000 or more PC's, and are now commercial enterprise software products are achieving significant adoption within the enterprise. We describe the technical requirements for acceptance (robustness, security, scalability, unobtrusiveness, manageability, and openness to applications), and the key technical solutions employed by the Entropia system.

We describe the Entropia systems architecture, detailing its internal architecture and technologies used to provide a robust, flexible system. Particular technologies include:

- scalable web/database technology for system management
- centralized configuration, monitoring, and administration
- binary sandboxing technology for security and unobtrusiveness
- open binary application integration, allowing applications to be
easily and securely enabled

We describe the use of desktop PC Grids to accelerate computational modelling and search applications critical to drug discovery. Typical applications are drawn from from Bioinformatics (BLAST, etc.), Molecular docking (DOCK, Gold, etc.) and Computational Chemistry (GAMESS, Charmm) and all involve large numbers of independent parallel runs. Some of these applications involve the use of significant quantities of data (either sequence or molecular databases), and large amounts of computation.

Biosketch:

Brad Calder is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He is a founding member and Director of Platform Engineering of a desktop distributed computing company called Entropia. Before joining UCSD in January of 1997, he co-founded a startup called Tracepoint, which built performance analysis tools using x86 binary modification technology. In addition, he has worked as a Principal Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab in Palo Alto. His research focuses on the interaction between computer architecture and compilers. Brad Calder received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1995. He obtained a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Washington in 1991. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. His additional research and technology expertise include application specific and embedded processors, optimizations for reducing memory latency, fetch prediction architectures, adaptive power optimizations, value prediction, predicated execution, and multiple path execution.

About Entropia

Entropia, Inc. is a leading provider of distributed computing software which enable enterprises to capture the idle time of their desktop PCs, converting them into a flexible aggregate computing resource. Entropia's innovative technologies support leading-edge drug discovery and financial modeling applications in the pharmaceuticals, chemicals, materials, and financial services businesses. Entropia is a privately held company headquartered in San Diego.