Content about Middleware

Feature - Grid sails to the aid of shipbuilding New FSG ships anchored next to the factory building where they were constructed. Image courtesy of FSG Shipyards in Europe cannot compete on price alone against overseas competitors, especially those based in the Far East.Consequently, European shipbuilders must  concentrate on high-quality construction projects that are specially tailored to their customer's requirements. Each ship is a unique product, produced only once or in a very small run. To improve their competitive position, modern European shipyards must harness the most advanced simulation and design tools to produce complex structures cost effectively, in order to reduce the technical and economic risks at a time when orders for new ships are down worldwide.The goal? The complete, virtual design of a ship. The solution: the grid. At the Flensburger Schiffbau Gesellschaft (FSG) shipyard, managers wanted to find ways to design their ships so that they used less of costly materials such as steel — while r

Announcement - UNICORE Summit: call for papers Image courtesy of unicore.eu  Event: UNICORE Summit 2009, to be held in conjunction with Euro-Par 2009 Venue: Delft, The Netherlands Dates: UNICORE Summit: 25 August 2009Submissions due: 9 June, 2009Notifications of acceptance: 21 July 2009Camera ready version due: 4 August 2009Submission information: Format (LNCS)Submit as email attachment to unicore-summit@fz-juelich.de   Registration (handled by Euro-Par 2009) and hotel information The UNICORE grid technology provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access to distributed grid resources. UNICORE is a full-grown and well-tested grid middleware system, which today is used in daily production worldwide. Beyond this production usage, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in many European and international projects. In order to foster these ongoing developments, UNICORE is available as open source under BSD licence.The UNICORE Summit is a unique opportunity for grid users, developers, administrators, researchers, and

Feature - Truth serum for researchers on the grid William S. Vickrey (1914-1996)Image courtesy of nobelprize.org. Needs images When you request time on a shared computing resource, are you always scrupulously honest about your job’s urgency and requirements?  Andrew Mutz and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara have developed a scheduler that discourages you from fibbing. It maximizes “rewards” and minimizes “costs” to users when their stated scheduling preferences are true.  Not quite ready for prime time, it applies some time-tested concepts in a new way.The team’s reservation-based version of the Portable Batch System (PBS) scheduler uses techniques derived from William Vickrey’s Nobel prize-winning work on the economic theory of incentives. Several variations of a scheme called the Vickrey Auction exist, the common feature being an incentive to bidders to bid their true value.  The team refers to its scheduling scheme as the Dynamic Programming

  Opinion - What clouds and grids can learn from each other Cloud computing adds an extra dimension of flexibility.Image courtesy of Ben Rhydding, sxc.hu  During the past 10 years, hundreds of grid projects have come and gone, passing away after funding ran dry. Most didn’t have a realistic strategy for sustainability, let alone a viable business model for their infrastructures, tools, applications or services. Often, the only asset left after the project’s end was the hands-on expertise gained by those involved, which is certainly valuable in the long run, but doesn’t justify the effort and funding. So far, in my opinion, grids didn’t keep up to their full promise.What went wrong?Sure, grids, by their very nature, are complex to design, build and maintain; and applications are cumbersome to run. It might take another 10 years of trial and error (and re-writing grid middleware?) to navigate the labyrinth of new technologies and paradigms, such as Utility Computing, Autonomic Co

Feature - GridFTP moves your data and your news Cluster-to-cluster data movement with GridFTP using up to 64 nodes on each end of TeraGrid’s 30 Gbit/s wide area network between Urbana, IL and San Diego, CA.Images courtesy of Raj Kettimuthu (plot) and Corky and Holly Siegel (duck). GridFTP, a data transfer protocol optimized for high-bandwidth wide-area networks, handles an average of more than 2.5 million data transfers a day.The Large Hadron Collider, the Southern California Earthquake Center, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, the European Space Agency, the Disaster Recovery Center in Japan and even the British Broadcasting Corporation use it. Based on the old workhorse FTP, GridFTP supports reliable and restartable data transfers and provides extensions for high-performance operation and security. It is a specification (meaning anyone can write code to implement it) for which standards are defined within the Open Grid Forum. Globus Allianc

Grid computing walks the standard line: thinking inside the box With many projects involved, truly seamlesss interoperability can be a challenge.Image courtesy of NorduGrid and Vicky White“Standard” is often equated with “average” or “boring.” How can you innovate or invent when you’re bound by standards and regulations? How can you push the boundaries when you’re stuck inside a box?Yet how can you create something on a grand scale—something that can slot into place with other grand things—unless you create something interoperable. Something . . . standard.In this special feature, former iSGTW editor (and now GridTalk editor) Cristy Burne reports on this easily overlooked aspect of grid computing. Why should we care? Standardizing grids: the current landscape Challenges for the future The way forward A standard in action: GridFTP A “de facto” standard: VOMSBONUS FEATURE: What does the grid community have to say about standards? (See what people from inst

Feature - Placing Kepler at the center of your computing system A scientific workflow describes a series of structured computations that arise in scientific problem-solving. Typically a sequence of analysis tools are invoked in a routine manner. Workflows often include sequences of format translations that ensure that the tools can process each other's outputs, and perform routine verification and validation of the data and the outputs to ensure that the computation as a whole remains on track. (Adapted from Munindar P. Singh and Mladen A. Vouk ) The LiDAR workfow communicates both with the portal and the Grid layers (click for larger version showing layers ). This central workflow layer, controlled by the Kepler workfow manager, coordinates the multiple distributed Grid components in a single environment as a data analysis pipeline. It submits and monitors jobs onto the Grid, and handles third party transfer of derived intermediate products among consecutive compute clusters, as defned by the workfow descri

Opinion - Securing the multi-platform grid There’s secure, and then there’s making things really secure. OMII project member and photographer Sergio Andreozzi shot this image in Florence. He said: “Each lock is attached by a couple who just got married, as a symbol of a strong union.”Image courtesy of Sergio Andreozzi, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), CNAF All locked up tight One of the biggest challenges facing scientists who wish to make use of multi-platform grid infrastructures today is reconciling the different security systems inherent in the various platforms. For the last two years, the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe (OMII-Europe) has been developing a flexible framework for integrating the three dominant platforms in use in Europe: UNICORE, gLite and Globus. (OMII-Europe is a separate initiative from OMII-UK, which is often referred to as OMII for historical reasons.) A major part of this work has been “unpicking” the diffe

Announcement - Registration open: Open Science Grid Users’ Meeting, June, U.S. The Open Science Grid is a national, distributed computing grid for data-intensive research. This image was taken at the OSG All-Hands meeting, held 3-6 March 2008. The next Open Science Grid Users’ Meeting will be held from 16-17 June 2008.Image courtesy of OSGRegistration is open for the Open Science Grid Users’ Meeting to be held at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, U.S., from 16-17 June 2008. The registration deadline is 9 May 2008. A tentative conference program is available and will continue to be updated in the coming weeks.This meeting is aimed mainly at users or prospective users of the Open Science Grid who:are responsible for development, maintenance or operation of applications that run on the OSG infrastructure, orare involved in any aspect of VO-specific infrastructure for OSG use, for example: workflow, meta-scheduling or portal management, orare users or prospective users of the OSG in any capacity and are

  Feature - The new Nimbus: first steps in the clouds Cloud computing services provide users with flexible compute capacity, allowing each user to lease a portion of the greater “cloud” of resources.Image courtesy of exper While grids are composed of many diverse resources, their applications usually require a very specific, validated environment. As a result, applications that work on a developer’s desktop may only function “out of the box” on a small fraction of the total number of compute resources potentially available to scientists on the grid. This is one of the primary obstacles users face in grid computing.A grid of your virtual machinesOne solution is to take the developer’s desktop and scale it to hundreds of nodes by mapping the desktop onto hundreds of virtual machines and deploying them onto grid resources. To facilitate this mode of using the grid, researchers at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago recently announced the availability of

  Feature - New bridge over muddled waters of grid storage Interoperability between the two islands of SRM and SRB opens up opportunities for different grids to share data; for example, scientists using the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid could now process data from the U.S. TeraGrid. Image courtesy of The Gentle Two islands of storage technology have been joined, according to a presentation at the EGEE User Forum in Clermont-Ferrand, France, last week. Jens Jensen, of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, told attendees how his team have successfully bridged two key grid technologies: the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) and Storage Resource Management (SRM). A demonstration of the bridging was first run at SC07 in Reno, Nevada, on behalf of the GridPP-led team.Two storage islands SRM and SRB are both ways of accessing the storage available on a grid—either using tapes, disks or disk arrays. Usually, storage elements running SRB can’t be seen by a grid running SRM, and vice versa. Most grids run one o

  Feature - Grid Technology Cookbook provides recipe for success The Grid Technology Cookbook has something for everyone, offering a comprehensive look at grid technologies developing around the world.Image courtesy of SURA Just as an ordinary cookbook provides everything you need to achieve in the kitchen, SURA’s recently released Grid Technology Cookbook brings together everything you need to achieve in grid computing. Introducing basic grid concepts and case studies through to more in-depth topics such as grid programming and standards, the cookbook is intended to assist researchers and technical professionals in understanding and implementing grid technology.“The Grid Technology Cookbook can bring people up to speed quickly,” says Paul Avery, physics professor at the University of Florida and member of the Open Science Grid Executive Board. “This includes administrators, program officers, scientific project leaders and scientists who need to expand their computational scale. It will serve as valu