Remote computing using the National Fusion Grid

The National Fusion Collaboratory (http://www.fusiongrid.org) uses grid technology to implement remote computing on the National Fusion Grid. The motivations are to reduce the cost of computing resources, shorten the software deployment cycle, and simplify remote computing for the user community. The National Fusion Collaboratory has successfully demonstrated remote access as a grid service to the TRANSP transport analysis code for tokamak experiments. TRANSP development and administration are now centralized at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), obviating both the need to port TRANSP to different platforms and the process of deploying TRANSP to remote sites. TRANSP users now share the resources of a powerful Linux cluster located at PPPL. Fusion researchers have completed over 900 TRANSP runs utilizing over 5600 h of CPU time since the TRANSP service was installed in October 2002.