Grid Computing Environments 2001 Special Issue of Concurrency and Computation:Practice and Experience

Original Call can be found at: gridgcespecialissue2001.html

• C531: The Grid Portal Development Kit
  • Abstract:Computational science portals are emerging as useful and necessary interfaces for performing operations on the Grid. The Grid Portal Development Kit (GPDK) facilitates the development of Grid portals and provides several key reusable components for accessing various Grid services. A Grid Portal provides a customizable interface allowing scientists to perform a variety of Grid operations including remote program submission, file staging, and querying of information services from a single, secure gateway. The Grid Portal Development Kit leverages off existing Globus/Grid middleware infrastructure as well as commodity web technology including Java Server Pages and servlets. We present the design and architecture of GPDK as well as a discussion on the portal building capabilities of GPDK allowing application developers to build customized portals more effectively by reusing common core services provided by GPDK.
  • Jason Novotny
  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • Email: JDNovotny@lbl.gov
  • Received 29 June 2001
  • Full Paper:C531gcenovotny/c531paper.pdf
• C532: NetBuild: Transparent Cross-Platform Access to Computational Software Libraries
  • Abstract:NetBuild is a suite of tools which automate the process of selecting, locating, downloading, configuing, and installing computational software libraries from over the Internet, and which aid in the construction and cataloging of such libraries. Unlike many other tools, NetBuild is designed to work across a wide variety of computing platforms, and perform fine-grained matching to find the most suitable version of a library for a given target platform. We describe the architecture of NetBuild and its initial implementation.
  • Keith Moore, Jack Dongarra
  • Innovative Computing Laboratory, University of Tennessee
  • Email: moore@cs.utk.edu
  • Received 1 July 2001
  • Full Paper:C532gcemoore/c532submit.pdf
• C533:The ASCI Computational Grid: Initial Deployment
  • Abstract:The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) computational grid consists of a handful of very large SMPs, some of which have dedicated visualization and IO nodes contained within them. There are also standalone visualization clusters of various architectures and three High Performance Storage Systems (HPSS) within the computing network. The systems are geographically widely distributed, but are connected by four stripes of OC-12 bandwidth. The user community is small by grid standards, with only a few analysts accounting for a large percentage of computing cycles and storage bandwidth.
    The goal of the Distributed Resource Management (DRM) project in this context is to simplify access to the diverse computing, storage, network, and visualization resources and to provide superior monitoring and job control mechanisms. To this point, our efforts have focused on implementing the grid infrastructure necessary to allow a user to submit, monitor, and control jobs in a secure manner. The final link in the initial deployment is the user interface itself. The next six months, as the system is introduced to users more accustomed to individualized scripts than to unified grids, will be a telling time for this particular grid computing environment.
  • Randal Rheinheimer, Steven L. Humphries, Hugh P. Bivens, Judy I. Beiriger
  • Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico
  • Email: randal@lanl.gov
  • Received 5 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C533gceasci/c533ascigrid.pdf
• 534: The Legion Grid Portal
  • Abstract:The Legion Grid Portal is an interface to a grid system. Users interact with the portal, and hence a grid through an intuitive interface from which they can view files, submit and monitor runs, and view accounting information. The architecture of the portal is designed to accommodate multiple diverse grid infrastructures, legacy systems and application-specific interfaces. The current implementation of the Legion Grid Portal is with familiar web technologies over the Legion grid infrastructure. The portal can be extended in a number of directions -- additional support for grid administrators, greater number of application-specific interfaces, interoperability between grid infrastructures, and interfaces for programming support. The portal has been in operation since February 2000 on npacinet,a worldwide grid managed by Legion on NPACI resources.
  • Anand Natrajan, Anh Nguyen-Tuong, Marty A. Humphrey, Andrew S. Grimshaw
  • Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4740, USA. Avaki Corporation, Charlottesville, VA 22902, USA
  • Email: an4m@cs.virginia.edu
  • Received 20 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C534natrajan/C534GCE01.pdf
• 535: Ecce - A Problem Solving Environment's Evolution Toward Grid Services and a Web Architecture
  • Abstract:The Extensible Computational Chemistry Environment (Ecce), an innovative problem solving environment (PSE), was designed a decade ago, before the emergence of the Web and Grid computing services. In this paper, we briefly examine the original Ecce architecture and discuss how it is evolving to incorporate both Grid services and components of the Web to increase its range of services, reduce deployment and maintenance costs, and reach a wider audience. We show that Ecce operates in both Grid and non-Grid environments, an important consideration given Ecce's broad range of uses and user community, and discuss the strategies for loosely coupled components that make this possible. Both in-progress work and conceptual plans for how Ecce will evolve are presented.
  • Karen Schuchardt, Brett Didier, Gary Black
  • Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
  • Email: brett.didier@pnl.gov
  • Received 23 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C535EccePNL/c535eccepnl.pdf
• 536: Features of the Java Commodity Grid Kit
  • Abstract:In this paper we report on the features of the Java Commodity Grid Kit. The Java CoG Kit provides middleware for accessing Grid functionality from the Java framework. Java CoG Kit middleware is general enough to design a variety of advanced Grid applications with quite different user requirements. Access to the Grid is established via Globus protocols, allowing the Java CoG Kit to communicate also with the C Globus reference implementation. Thus, the Java CoG Kit provides Grid developers with the ability to utilize the Grid, as well as numerous additional libraries and frameworks developed by the Java community to enable network, Internet, enterprise, and peer-to-peer computing. A variety of projects have successfully used the client libraries of the Java CoG Kit to access Grids driven by the C Globus software. In this paper we also report on the efforts to develop serverside Java CoG Kit components. As part of this research we have implemented a prototype pure Java resource management system that enables one to run Globus jobs on platforms on which a Java virtual machine is supported, including Windows NT machines.
  • Gregor von Laszewski, Jarek Gawor, Peter Lane, Nell Rehn, and Mike Russell
  • Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, 60439, U.S.A.
  • Email: gregor@mcs.anl.gov
  • Received 23 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C536javacog/c536featuresOfCoG.pdf
• 537: Mississippi Computational Web Portal
  • Abstract:This paper describes design and implementation of an open, extensible object-oriented framework that allows integrating new and legacy components into a single user-friendly Grid Computing Environment. This way we extend the researcher's desktop by providing seamless access to remote resources (that is, hardware, software and data), and thereby simplifying currently difficult to comprehend and changing interfaces and emerging protocols. The user, through the familiar Web Browser interface is able to compose complex computational tasks represented as a collection of middle-tier objects serving as proxies for services rendered by the back-end. The proxies through a grid resource broker use the grid services, as defined by the Global Grid Forum, to access remote computational resources. The middle-tier objects are persistent, and therefore once configured simulation can be reused, shared between users, or transition into operational or educational use.
  • Tomasz Haupt, Purushotham Bangalore, Gregory Henley
  • Engineering Research Center at Mississippi State University P.O.Box 9627, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA
  • Email: haupt@erc.msstate.edu
  • Received 23 July 2001
  • Full Paper:C537haupt/c537Concurrency02.pdf
• 538: The Integrated Simulation Environment TENT
  • Abstract:This paper describes recent development efforts on the integrated simulation environment TENT. TENT is a component-based software integration and work flow management system using the capabilities of CORBA and Java. It is used to integrate the applications required to form complex work flows, which are typical of multidisciplinary simulations in engineering, in which different simulation codes have to be coupled. We present here our work in integrating TENT with the Globus Toolkit to create a Grid computing environment. The Java Commodity Grid Toolkit has been especially useful for this work.
  • Andreas Schreiber
  • Deutsches Zentrum f. ur Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V., Simulation and Software Technology, Linder H.ohe, 51147 Cologne, Germany and Argonne National Laboratory, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne, IL 60439, U.S.A.
  • Email: schreibe@mcs.anl.gov
  • Received 23 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C538tent/tent_gce.pdf
• 539: Web-based access to the Grid using the Grid Resource Broker Portal
  • Abstract:This paper describes the Grid Resource Broker (GRB) portal, a web gateway to computational grids in use at the University of Lecce. The portal allows trusted users seamless access to computational resources and grid services, providing a friendly computing environment that takes advantage of the underlying Globus Toolkit middleware, enhancing its basic services and capabilities.
  • Giovanni Aloisio, Massimo Cafaro
  • ISUFI High Performance Computing Center Department of Innovation Engineering, University of Lecce, Italy
  • Email: giovanni.aloisio@unile.it
  • Received 19 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C539aloisio/c539grb.pdf
• 540: Innovations of the NetSolve Grid Computing System
  • Abstract:The NetSolve Grid Computing System was first developed in themid 1990s to provide users with seamless access to remotecomputational hardware and software resources. Since then,the system has benefited from many enhancements likesecurity services, data management faculties and distributedstorage infrastructures. This article is meant to providethe reader with details regarding the present state of theproject, describing the current architecture of the system,its latest innovations and other systems that make use of theNetSolve infrastructure.
  • D. Arnold, H. Casanova, and J. Dongarra
  • University of Tennessee
  • Email: dongarra@cs.utk.edu
  • Received 10 August 2001
  • Full Paper: C540netsolve/netsolve.pdf
• 541: Programming Environments for Multidisciplinary Grid Communities
  • Abstract:Rapid advances in technological infrastructure as well as the emphasis on application support systems have sig-naled the maturity of grid computing. Today’s grid computing environments (GCEs) extend the notion of a programming environment beyond the compile-schedule-execute paradigm to include functionality such as net-worked access, information services, data management, and collaborative application composition. In this article, we present GCEs in the context of supporting multidisciplinary communities of scientists and engineers. We present a high-level design framework for building GCEs and a space of characteristics that help identify require-ments for GCEs for multidisciplinary communities. By describing integrated systems for five different multidisci-plinary communities, we outline the unique responsibility (and opportunity) for GCEs to exploit the larger context of the scientific or engineering application, defined by the ongoing activities of the pertinent community. Finally, we describe several core systems support technologies that we have developed to support multidisciplinary GCE applications.
  • Naren Ramakrishnan, Layne T. Watson, Dennis G. Kafura, Calvin J. Ribbens, and Clifford A. Shaffer
  • Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061
  • Email: ramakris@trinetra.cs.vt.edu
  • Received 20 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C541natarajan/c541vt-gridce.pdf
• 542: An Integrated Software Development Environment for Grid-Computing
  • Abstract:Grid-Computing has become a popular concept in the last years. While in the beginning the driving force was metacomputing, the focus has now shifted towards resource management issues and concepts like ubiquitous computing. For the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) the key challenges of Grid-Computing were coming from its users and customers demands. With high speed networks in place, programmers expect to be able to exploit the overall performance of several instruments and high speed systems for their applications. In order to meet these demands, HLRS has set out a research effort to provide these users with the necessary tools to develop and run their codes on clusters of supercomputers.
  • M. Mueller , E. Gabriel and M. Resch
  • HLRS - High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, Allmandring 30, 70550 Stuttgart, Germany
  • Email: mueller@hlrs.de
  • Received 23 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C542mueller/mueller_cpe.pdf
• 543: The Gateway Computational Web Portal
  • Abstract:In this paper we describe the basic services and architecture of Gateway, a commodity- based web portal that provides secure remote access to unclassifed Department of Defense computational resources. The portal consists of a dynamically generated, browser-based user interface supplemented by client applications and a distributed middle tier, WebFlow. WebFlow provides a coarse-grained approach to accessing both stand-alone and grid-enabled back end computing resources. We describe in detail the implementation of basic portal features such as job submission, file transfer, and job monitoring and discuss how the portal addresses security requirements of the deployment centers. Finally, we outline future plans, including integration of Gateway with Department of Defense testbed grids.
  • Marlon. E. Pierce, Choonhan Youn, Geoffrey C. Fox
  • Florida State University (School of Computational Science and Information Technology), Indiana University (Pervasive Technology Laboratories)
  • Email: pierceme@asc.hpc.mil
  • Received 23 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C543pierce/c543gateway.pdf
• 544: A CORBA Commodity Grid Kit
  • Abstract:This paper reports on an ongoing research project aimed at designing and deploying a CORBA Commodity Grid (CoG) Kit. The overall goal of this project is to enable the development of advanced Grid applications while adhering to state -of-the-art software engineering practices and reusing the existing Grid infrastructure. As part of this activity, we are investigating how CORBA can be used to support this software engineering task. In this paper, we outline the design of a CORBA Commodity Grid Kit that will provide a software development framework for building a CORBA “Grid domain.” We also present our experiences in developing a prototype CORBA CoG Kit that support the development and deployment of CORBA applications on the Grid by providing them access to the Grid services provided by the Globus Toolkit.
  • Gregor von Laszewski, Manish Parashar, Snigdha Verma, Jarek Gawor, Kate Keahey, and Nell Rehn,
  • The Applied Software Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 94 Brett Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8058, U.S.A.) and Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, U.S.A.
  • Email: gregor@mcs.anl.gov
  • Received 23 July 2001
  • Full Paper:C544corbacog/corbacog.pdf
• 545: pyGlobus: A Python interface to the Globus Toolkit
  • Abstract:Developing high-performance problem solving environments/applications that allow scientists to easily harness the power of the emerging national-scale “Grid” infrastructure is currently a difficult task. Although many of the necessary low-level services, e.g. security, resource discovery, remote access to compute/data resource, etc., are available, it can be a challenge to rapidly inte-grate them into a new application. To address this difficulty we have begun the development of a Python based high-level interface to the Grid services provided by the Globus Toolkit [ref]. In this paper we will explain why rapid application development using Grid services is important, look briefly at a motivating examle, and finally look at the design and implemenation of the pyGlobus package.
  • Keith Jackson
  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • Email: krjackson@lbl.gov
  • Received 23 July 2001
  • Full Paper: c545jackson/c545python-cog-cpe.pdf
• 546: MyPYTHIA: A Recommendation Portal for Scientific Software and Services
  • Abstract:In this paper, we outline the design of a recommendation system (MyPYTHIA) implemented as a web portal. MyPYTHIA’s design objectives include evaluating the quality and performance of scientific software on grid platforms, creating knowledge about which software and computational services should be selected for solv-ing particular problems, selecting parameters of software (or of computational services) based on user-specified computational objectives, providing access to performance data and knowledge bases over the web, and enabling recommendations for targeted application domains. MyPYTHIA uses a combination of statistical analysis, pattern extraction techniques, and a database of software performance to map feature-based representations of problem instances to appropriate software. MyPYTHIA’s open architecture allows the user to customize it for conducting individual case studies. We describe the architecture as well as several scientific domains of knowledge enabled by such case studies.
  • E. HOUSTIS, A. C. CATLIN, N. DHANJANI and J. R. RICE, N. RAMAKRISHNAN and V. VERYKIOS
  • Department of Computer Sciences Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47906, Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech University Blacksburg, VA 24061, College of Information Science and Technology Drexel University Philadelphia, PA 19104.
  • Email: enh@cs.purdue.edu
  • Received 26 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C546houstis/c546paper.pdf
• 547: A Distributed Computing Environment for Interdisciplinary Applications
  • Abstract:Practical applications are generally interdisciplinary in nature. The technology is well matured for addressing individual discipline applications and not for interdisciplinary applications. Hence, there is a need to couple the capabilities of several different computational disciplines to address these interdisciplinary practical applications. One approach is to use coupled or multi-physics software, which typically involves developing and validating the entire software spectrum for a specific application, which will be time consuming and may require more time to get to the end user. The other approach is to integrate individual well-matured computational technology discipline's software by taking advantage of the existing scalable software and validation investments, and tremendous developments in computer science and computational sciences. This integrated approach requires consistent data model, data format, data management, seamless data movement, and robust modular scalable including coupling algorithms. To address these requirements, we developed a new flexible data exchange mechanism for HPC codes and tools, known as the eXtensible Data Model and Format (XDMF). XDMF provides computational engines with the tools necessary to exist in a modern computing environment with minimal modification. Instead of imposing a new programming paradigm on HPC codes, XDMF uses the existing concept of file I/O for distributed coordination. XDMF incorporates Network Distributed Global Memory (NDGM), Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5), and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to provide a flexible yet efficient data exchange mechanism. . This paper discusses development and implementation of distributed computing environment for interdisciplinary applications utilizing the concept of a common data hub. Also, the implementation of XDMF is demonstrated for a typical blast-structure interaction interdisciplinary application.
  • Jerry A. Clarke, Raju R. Namburu
  • US Army Research Laboratory Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD
  • Email: clarke@arl.army.mil
  • Received 27 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C547Clarke/c574paper.pdf
• 548: A Web Services Data Analysis Grid
  • Abstract:The trend in large-scale scientific data analysis is to exploit compute, storage and other resources located at multiple sites, and to make those resources accessible to the scientist as if they were a single, coherent system. Web technologies driven by the huge and rapidly growing electronic commerce industry provide valuable components to speed the deployment of such sophisticated systems. Jefferson Lab, where several hundred terabytes of experimental data are acquired each year, is in the process of developing a web-based distributed system for data analysis and management. The essential aspects of this system are a distributed data grid (site independent access to experiment, simulation and model data) and a distributed batch system, augmented with various supervisory and management capabilities, and integrated using Java and XML-based web services.
  • William A. Watson III , Ian Bird, Jie Chen, Bryan Hess, Andy Kowalski, Ying Chen
  • Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility 12000 Jefferson Av, Newport News, VA 23606, USA
  • Email: Chip.Watson@jlab.org
  • Received 27 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C548watson/LatticePortal_paper_v1.pdf
• 549: Engineering Interoperable Computational Collaboratories on the Grid - Advances in the DISCOVER Project
  • Abstract:The growth of the Internet and the advent of the computational Grid have made it possible to develop and deploy advanced computational collaboratories. These systems build on high-end computational resources and communication technologies underlying the Grid, and provide seamless and collaborative access to resources, services or applications. Combining these focused collaboratories and allowing them to interoperate has many advantages and can lead to truly collaborative, multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional problem solving. However, integrating these collaboratories presents significant challenges, as each of these collaboratories has a unique architecture and implementation, and builds on different enabling technologies. This paper investigates the requirements and an architecture for interoperability among collaboratories on the Grid. It then presents the design of a middleware substrate that addresses interoperability, and a prototype implementation of this middleware substrate, to enable a peer-to-peer integration of and global collaborative access to multiple, geographically distributed instances of the DISCOVER computational collaboratory. An experimental evaluation of the middleware substrate is also presented.
  • Vijay Mann and Manish Parashar
  • The Applied Software Systems Laboratory Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rutgers University 94 Brett Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854
  • Email: parashar@caip.rutgers.edu
  • Received 27 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C549parashar/Concurrency-Final.pdf
• 550: Community Software Development with the Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory
  • Abstract:We describe a Grid-based collaboratory that supports the collaborative development and use of advanced simulation codes. Our implementation of this collaboratory uses a mix of Web technologies (for thin-client access) and Grid services (for secure remote access to, and management of, distributed resources). Our collaboratory enables researchers in geographically dispersed locations to share and access compute, storage, and code resources, without regard to institutional boundaries. Specialized services support community code development, via specialized Grid services, such as online code repositories. We use this framework to construct the Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory, a domain-specific collaboratory for the astrophysics simulation community. This Grid-based collaboratory enables researchers in the field of numerical relativity to study astrophysical phenomena by using the Cactus computational toolkit.
  • Gregor von Laszewski, Michael Russell, Ian Foster, John Shalf, Gabrielle Allen, Greg Daues, Jason Novotny, Edward Seidel
  • Max-Planck-Institut füur Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut, Golm, Germany; University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, U.S.A.; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.; National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Champaign, IL, U.S.A.; Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, 60439, U.S.A.; Washington University, St Louis, MI, U.S.A.
  • Email: gregor@mcs.anl.gov
  • Received 29 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C550ascportal/cactus2.pdf
• 551: An Event Service to Support Grid Computational Environments
  • Abstract:The Grid Event Service (GES) is a distributed event service designed to run on a very large network of server nodes.Clients interested in using this service can attach themselves to one of the server nodes.Clients specify an interest in the type of events that they are interested in and the service routes events,which satisfy the constraints specified by the clients.Clients can have prolonged disconnects from the server network and can also roam the network (in response to failure suspicions or for better response times) and attach themselves to any other node in the server node network.Events published during the intervening period,of prolonged disconnects and roams,must still be delivered to clients that originally had an interest in these events.The delivery constraints must be satisfied even in the presence of server failures.Server nodes can fail and remain failed forever.Clients need not wait for the failed server nodes to recover.Affected clients can then roam to a new location and thus not experience any denial of service.
  • Geoffrey Fox, Shrideep Pallickara
  • Department of Computer Science, Indiana University; Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Syracuse University.
  • Email: shrideep@csit.fsu.edu
  • Received 31 July 2001
  • Full Paper:C551pallickara/CCPEshrideep.pdf
• 552: Economics Paradigm for Resource Management and Scheduling in Grid Computing
  • Abstract:The accelerated development in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Grid computing has positioned them as promising next generation computing platforms. They enable the creation of Virtual Enterprises (VE) for sharing resources distributed across the world. However, resource management, application development and usage models in these environments is a complex undertaking. This is due to the geographic distribution of resources that are owned by different organizations or peers. The resource owners of each of these resources have different usage or access policies and cost models, and varying loads and availability. In order to address complex resource management issues, we have proposed a computational economy framework for resource allocation and for regulating supply and demand in Grid computing environments. The framework provides mechanisms for optimizing resource provider and consumer objective functions through trading and brokering services. In a real world market, there exist various economic models for setting the price for goods based on supply-and-demand and their value to the user. They include commodity market, posted price, tenders and auctions. In this paper, we discuss the use of these models for interaction between Grid components in deciding resource value and the necessary infrastructure to realize them. In addition to normal services offered by Grid computing systems, we need an infrastructure to support interaction protocols, allocation mechanisms, currency, secure banking, and enforcement services. We briefly discuss existing technologies that provide some of these services and show their usage in developing Nimrod-G grid resource broker. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usage of some of these economic models in resource brokering through Nimrod/G deadline and cost-based scheduling for two different optimization strategies on the World Wide Grid (WWG) testbed that contains peer-to-peer resources distributed across five continents.
  • Rajkumar Buyya, David Abramson, Jonathan Giddy, and Heinz Stockinger
  • CRC for Enterprise Distributed Systems, Technology School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, CMS Experiment, Computing Group, Database Section CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
  • Email: rajkumar@csse.monash.edu.au
  • Received 30 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C552buyya/c552paper.pdf
• 553: UNICORE – A Grid Computing Environment
  • Abstract:This paper gives an overview over the goals, functions, architecture and future development of UNICORE. Its primary goal is to give researchers a seamless access to distributed resources that are available at remote sites. A graphical interface aids users to formulate jobs which are to be performed in a system and site independent fashion. This procedure allows switching between systems without having to change the job. Complex jobs with individual applications running on different systems at different sites may be formulated. UNICORE will perform synchronization and data transfers as required without any user intervention. UNICORE uses X.509 certificates to authenticate users, software, and systems and provide secure communication over the internet.
  • Dietmar W. Erwin
  • Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Zentralinstitut für Mathematik (ZAM) D52425 Jülich, Germany
  • Email: D.Erwin@fz-juelich.de
  • Received 30 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C553unicore/UNICORE-CCPE.pdf
• 554: The Polder Computing Environment, a system for interactive distributed simulation
  • Abstract:The paper provides an overview of an experimental, GRID-like computing environment Polder and its components. Polder offers high-performance computing and interactive simulation facilities to computational science. The characteristics of the underlying wide-area cluster system DAS are described. The issues of efficient management of resources, in particular multi-level scheduling and migration of tasks that use PVM or sockets are discussed. The system can be used for interactive simulation, where a cluster is used for high-performance computations, while a dedicated immersive interactive environment (CAVE) offers visualization and user interaction. Design considerations for the construction of dynamic exploration environments using such a system are discussed, in particular the use of Intelligent Agents for coordination. A case study of simulated abdominal vascular reconstruction is subsequently presented: the results of computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging of a patient can be displayed in CAVE, and a surgeon can evaluate the possible treatments by performing the surgeries virtually and analysing the resulting blood flow, simulated using the lattice-Boltzmann method.
  • K. A. Iskra,R. G. Belleman, G. D. van Albada, J. Santoso, P. M. A. Sloot, H. E. Bal, H. J. W. Spoelder and M. Bubak
  • Section Computational Science, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Division of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Division of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Institute of Computer Science, AGH, al. Mickiewicza 30, 30-059 Krak´ow, Poland; Academic Computer Centre – CYFRONET, Nawojki 11, 30-950 Krak´ow, Poland
  • Email: dick@science.uva.nl
  • Received 23 July 2001
  • Full Paper: C554polder/c554polderpaper.pdf
• 555: Component-Based Problem Solving Environments for Large-Scale Scientific Computing
  • Abstract:SCIRun is a problem solving environment that allows the interactive construction, debugging, and steering of large-scale scientific computations. Over the past few years, we have developed two additional problem solving environments that extend SCIRun's capabilities: BioPSE and Uintah. The mission of the BioPSE project is to release state-of-the-art software, datasets, and documentation for researchers investigating bioelectric field problems. Uintah is designed to specifically address the problems of interdisciplinary, massively-parallel scientific computation on terascale computing platforms. These three systems, SCIRun, BioPSE, and Uintah, together target a broad range of vastly different problem domains and target users.
  • Chris Johnson , Steve Parker , David Weinstein
  • Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, 84112
  • Email: crj@cs.utah.edu
  • Received 7 August 2001
  • Full Paper: C555scirun/johnson_paper.pdf
• 556: Grid Scripts and Notebooks: Programming Distributed Component Applications
  • Abstract:
  • Dennis Gannon, Randall Bramley, Sriram Krishnan
  • Indiana University
  • Email: gannon@cs.indiana.edu
  • Received 8 August 2001
  • Full Paper:
• 557: Application Portals: Practice and Experience
  • Abstract:The implementation of multiple Grid computing portals has led us to develop a methodology for Grid portal development that facilitates rapid prototyping and building of portals. Based on the NPACI Grid Portal Toolkit (GridPort) and the NPACI HotPage, all portals inherit interactive Grid services, share a single account and login environment, and share the infrastructure required to support and provide services used by each portal. We have demonstrated that the GridPort software can be used in production application portal environments, that the software can be configured to extend multiple sites. In this paper, we describe our experiences gained in building Grid portals and developing software for the Grid. We describe the architecture and design of the portal system, Grid services and systems employed, as well as the unique features of the system. We present descriptions of several application portals and the driving design choices. Finally, we discuss the new and emerging architecture system that being studied based on the web services architecture.
  • M. Dahan, K. Mueller, S. Mock, C. Mills, M. Thomas
  • San Diego Supercomputer Center
  • Email: mthomas@sdsc.edu
  • Received 9 September 2001
  • Full Paper:C557hotpage/CPE_App_Portals.pdf
• 558: The Perl Commodity Grid Toolkit
  • Abstract:The Computational Grid is the term applied to the infrastructure being constructed to coordinate the use of widely distributed computational resources for high end problem solving. Complex services are deployed to add functionality like authentication, remote access to resources, resource management, and directory services to the Grid. The development of the Grid has been focused on high-end computing, rather than user interface. Using these complex services provides challenges to users and developers of Grid software. Web portals like the NPACI HotPage simplify the use of Grid services by hiding the complexities of the Grid from portal users while giving them powerful tools accessible through an easy-to-use interface. Without a toolkit that provides interfaces to the Grid services, the developers of each new portal must master the complexities of the Grid in order to incorporate the Grid services into their software. The Commodity Grid project is working to overcome these difficulties by creating what are called Commodity Grid Toolkits (CoG Kits). "A Commodity Grid Toolkit (CoG Kit) defines and implements a set of general components that map Grid functionality into a commodity environment/framework.". The Commodity Grid project is developing CoG Kits in Java, Python, CORBA, and Perl. The Perl CoG Kit, like the others, provides an API to Grid services for developers of higher-level Grid applications. The Perl CoG Kit is intended to be used by any developer who wants to use the Perl programming language, and has a need to use Grid services in the application that they are developing. In particular, web portals are a good example of applications that use grid services, although there are any number of other example applications which fall into this category. The NPACI HotPage is a portal that utilizes the Grid to provide users with web access to computational resources at NPACI. The HotPage began as a portal to give users information about resources across the NPACI organization. The need to add interactive features like file manipulation and job submission provided the motivation for creating software to help interface the portal and the Grid. The code that was developed to give HotPage access to Grid services, like job submission, was packaged into a toolkit called the Grid Portal Toolkit, or GridPort. GridPort supports the development of web based Grid portals. It provides access to authentication, job submission and management, and file manipulation via a Perl library interface. A number of portals, including the Telescience Portal, LAPK, and GAMESS use GridPort. GridPort is a set of Perl libraries, rather than Perl modules, and it does not offer object-oriented interfaces to any of its code. Our experiences in building GridPort were very useful in creating the Perl CoG.
  • S. Mock, M. Dahan, M. Thomas, G. von Lazewski
  • San Diego Supercomputer Center
  • Email: mthomas@sdsc.edu
  • Received 6 September 2001
  • Full Paper: C558perlcogkit/CPE_Perl_CoG_submitted.pdf