Project Management Plan

Goals

The National Fusion Collaboratory Project is developing a persistent infrastructure to enable scientific collaboration for all aspects of magnetic fusion energy research. Specifically, the project is creating a robust, user-friendly collaborative software environment and deploying this to the more than one thousand fusion scientists in forty institutions who perform magnetic fusion research in the United States.

Goals of the Collaboratory. The aim of the Collaboratory is to:

• Create transparent and secure access to local/remote computation, visualization, and data servers.
• Develop collaborative visualization that allows interactive sharing of graphical images among control room display devices, meeting room displays, and with offices over a wide area network.
• Enable real-time access to high-powered remote computational services allowing such capabilities as between pulse analysis of experimental data and advanced scientific simulations.

Benefits to Fusion. The National Fusion Collaboratory will increase physics productivity by

• Enabling more efficient utilization of experimental time on the three large facilities through more powerful between pulse data analysis resulting in a greater number of experiments at less cost.
• Allowing more transparent access to analysis and simulation codes, data, and visualization tools resulting in more researchers having access to more resources.
• Creating a standard tool set for remote data access, security, and visualization allowing more researchers to build these services into their own tools.
• Facilitating the comparison of theory and experiment.
• Facilitating multi-institution collaborations.

Project Organization and Responsibilities

Principle Investigators

David P. Schissel, from the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, is the overall principal investigator for the project. He is assisted by seven Co-PIs that together represent the project management committee. Resource allocation and direction will be the repsonsibility of the management committee. The Co-PIs are:

• Kate Keahey, Distributed Systems Lab, ANL
• Adam Finkelstein, Princeton University Computer Science
• Martin J. Greenwald, Alcator C-Mod Tokamak Fusion Research Project
• Christopher R. Johnson, University of Utah Imagining Institute
• Douglas C. McCune, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab
• Mike Papka, Futures Lab, ANL
• Mary R. Thompson, Distributed Systems, LBNL

Project Organization and Responsibilities

The principle investigator, David Schissel, has overall responsibility for executing the project. He is directly supported by the Co-PIs and existing organizations within the DIII-D National Fusion Facility including Planning and Scheduling, Contracts, Purchasing, Finance, and Publications. Work elements have been subdivided into direct tasks and subtasks in accorance with the WBS. Three technical working groups have been organized around the three main research thrusts: Security, Remote and Distributed Computing, and Scientific Visualization. These organizations have the overall responsibility to move the technical and research and development plans forward, and to coordinate the efforts at each site in those areas.

Project User Oversight: User Oversight Committee

The oversight committee has been selected from the fusion community to advise on requirements and provide feedback. Members of this committee have been selected so as to represent the geographically diverse fusion research community. Oversight committee members include:

• Tom Casper, Physicist, Fusion Energy Program, LLNL
• Bill Dorland, Assistant Professor of Physics, U. of Maryland
• Bob Granetz, Physicist, Alcator C-Mod Tokamak Fusion Research Project
• Chuck Greenfield, Principal Scientist, DIII-D National Fusion Facility
• Stan Kaye, Head NSTX Physics Analysis Division, PPPL
• Masanori Murakami, Physicist, DIII-D On-site coordinator, ORNL
• Carl Sovinec, Assistant Professor of Physics, U. of Wisconsin

The oversight committee meets formally once a year with the management committee to review progress and provide feedback from the fusion user and code developer communities. Numerous informal discussions take place with the committee members at various fusion science meetings held throughout the year.

Project Review

The project is reviewed once a year by the Program Advisory Committee (PAC) for the Plasma Science Advanced Computing Institute (PSACI). Member's of the PAC include:

• William Kruer, PAC Chairman, Distinguished Laboratory Fellow, LLNL
• James Callen, Professor of Engineering Physics, U. of Wisconsin
• Ronald Cohen, Head, MFE Theory Program, LLNL
• Ronald Davidson, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton U.
• John Dawson, Professor of Physics, UCLA
• Patrick Diamond, Professor of Physics, UCSD
• James Drake, Professor of Physics & Astronomy, U. of Maryland
• Richard Hazeltine, Director of IFS, U. of Texas at Austin
• Russell Hulse, Nobel Laureatte and Distinguished Laboratory Fellow, PPPL
• Kenneth Kliewer, Director, Center for Computer Sciences, ORNL
• Kai Li, Professor of Computer Sciences, Princeton U.
• William McCurdy, Assoc. Lab. Director for Computing Sciences, LBNL
• Steven Orszag, Professor of Mathematics, Yale U.
• Marshall Rosenbluth, Professor of Physics, UCSD
• Bruce Ross, Dep. Director and Head of Computing, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

Bill Tang of PPPL is the Director of the PSACI and Vincent Chan is the Assistant Director. There are a diverse group of scientific questions being addressed under the auspices of the PSACI and as such its PAC is able to offer strong insight into how the Collaboratory Project can benefit the U.S. fusion community.

The Collaboratory Project will also be reviewed once by a panel of computer scientists and discipline scientists. This review will be conducted and organized by the USDOE Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.

Meetings

The Collaboratory Project will participate in a variety of computer science and fusion science meetings. These annual meetings include:

• The American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics (APS/DPP).
• The Sherwood Theory Meeting
• The Joint US-European Transport Task Force Meeting
• SuperComputing
• The Global Grid Forum
• The IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing
• PSACI PAC Review
• Project User Oversight Committee Meeting

As appropriate, the Collaboratory Project will hold project specific meetings as satellite workshops during the above meetings. When required, dedicated face-to-face project meetings will be held. On a more regular basis, teleconferences will allow project members to stay in close contact.

SciDAC Project Coordination

One of the SciDAC program's principal goals is to assemble interdisciplinary teams and collaboratories to develop the necessary state-of-the-art mathematical algorithms and software, supported by appropriate hardware and middleware infrastructure, to use terascale computers effectively to advance fundamental research in science central to the DOE science mission.  As such, the Collaboratory Project works closely with a number of other SciDAC projects:

• Center for Extended Magnetohydrodynamic Modeling
• The Plasma Microturbulence Project
• Numerical Computation of Wave-Plasma Interactions in Multi-dimensional Systems
• DOE Science Grid
• Particle Physics Data Grid
• Security and Policy for Group Collaboration
• A High Performance Data Grid Toolkit
• Middleware to Support Group to Group Collaboration

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