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Appendix 27. ICFA SCIC Digital Divide Update on

CHEPREO, AMPATH and the WHREN/LILA

Links to Latin America

Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment (CIARA) at Florida

International University

Submitted by Heidi Alvarez and Julio Ibarra, FIU

February 2008

CIARA is home to several projects that have been contributing to closing the digital divide in

collaboration with colleagues in Latin America, Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and

China. CIARA first began contributing to the ICFA SCIC digital divide update in 2002 as

AMPATH.  In this report we provide updates on CHEPREO which was founded in 2003,

AMPATH operating as the international exchange point in Miami, WHREN-LILA providing

high performance network connectivity since 2005, the AtlanticWave established in 2006, and

Global CyberBridges education and outreach now in its second year.

CHEPREO: An Inter-Regional Center for High-Energy Physics

Research and Education Outreach:

CHEPREO is one of USA's most innovative education and outreach programs within a large

minority student population while supporting basic research in particle physics, grid computing,

and advanced networking. The project is based in the Florida International University (FIU)

Department of Physics, but includes faculty and personnel from College of Education, School of

Computer and Information Science, and the Center for Internet Augmented Research and

Assessment (CIARA), along with university partners at University of Florida, Florida State

University, and the California Institute of Technology, as well as universities (UERJ,

USP/UNESP) in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo Brazil.

CHEPREO has created a community of learners engaged in collaborative research based on four

key elements: high-energy physics research at the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron

Collider; a broad science and technology education program where new learning models are

developed and implemented; advanced grid and networking cyberinfrastructure and "cyber-

environments" that enable student participation in globally distributed research with partners in

Brazil and CERN.

CHEPREO Tier3 Facility:

CHEPREO's Tier3 Facility currently houses a total of 25 nodes serving various purposes. It is

necessary that when operating a cluster computing infrastructure a front-end node is deployed

based on the ROCKS software configuration. This front-end node is configured as a dual-Xeon

2.66 GHz CPU, 4 GB of RAM, 250 GB HDD machine. A total of 13 compute nodes are dual

Xeon 2.66 GHz CPU nodes, each with 2 GB of RAM and a total of 250 GB of HDD storage.

Figure 85 shows the CHEPREO Tier3 cluster. Aside from these, a 1.5 TB NAS storage element

is deployed as part of the current OSG Tier3 infrastructure.

A second cluster, with reduced computational power (fewer compute nodes) is also in production.

This CMS analysis cluster is used mainly by FIU faculty to submit simulation jobs and serves as

the testbed for future OSG/ROCKS deployments at the main Tier3 site. The machines here are

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