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Content about Middleware

October 3, 2007
iSGTW Technology - UNICORE 6: one month on

  Technology - UNICORE 6: one month on Release 6 of the UNICORE, or Uniform Interface to Computing Resources, grid middleware enables easy web services-based access to computing and data resources Image courtesy of UNICORE Officially released 28 August at the UNICORE Summit 2007 at Rennes, France, UNICORE 6 has launched itself into the middleware scene with much gusto. Billed by developers as a “modern, lean software stack,” this latest version of the open-source middleware implements a service-oriented architecture that complies with current web service standards to support interoperability and ease of use.“In this first month we’ve seen in the order of 920 downloads,” says UNICORE’s Achim Streit. “We’re very pleased with this start. We know its already being used for several projects on Germany’s D-Grid and these developers are very eager to develop their services on top of UNICORE 6.”Development versions of UNICORE 6 are also in use in the European projects Che

September 19, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Pegasus invites new communities to saddle up

  Feature - Pegasus invites new communities to saddle up This mosaic image of the Orion Nebula was created by Montage using Pegasus and DAGMan tools. Workflow softare Pegasus chains dependent tasks together, so that multiple tasks can be automatically completed in the correct order.  Image courtesy of PegasusGrid workflow system Pegasus recently earned new wings with a share in a US$1.7 million grant from the U.S. Office of CyberInfrastructure, awarded over three years to make further improvements to Pegasus’ usability and breadth of support.Pegasus’ principal investigator, Ewa Deelman from the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, says the grant has come at the perfect time. “We’re now in a position to work with more communities and more users, including those using Open Science Grid and TeraGrid, to bring Pegasus technologies to their computing work.”Pegasus allows researchers to translate complex computational tasks into workflows that link and manage

June 27, 2007
iSGTW Link of the week - Power through your data with data turbine

Link of the week - Power through your data with data turbine Like to linger over each piece of your data? Or do you prefer to cruise through at high speed? Now you can have your hare, and tortoise too.Image courtesy of Bruvvers Theatre CompanyEver wish you could record your data and then browse it later, both more quickly and more slowly than real time? You can. Data Turbine, a middleware tool for gathering remote sensor data, does for data what TiVo® does for TV.  Based on extensive development work in the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Cyberinfrastructure Center at San Diego Supercomputer Center in the United States, the middleware is now being hosted in NEESforge at SDSC. Data Turbine is especially good at aggregating dissimilar data sources scattered across a network, and thus  it provides researchers with a way to work together on multiple kinds of data.This tool, originally developed by Creare, is now freely downloadable as open source for noncommercial use.

May 30, 2007
iSGTW Acronym of the Week - DAGMan

Acronym of the Week - DAGMan A Directed Acyclic Graph represents job dependency: each graphical node signifies a job, and the arcs identify job dependencies. This DAG shows the computational pipeline managed by Condor for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory project.Image courtesy of LIGO Scientific CorporationThe word “dag” can have many meanings. The American Heritage Dictionary of English Language defines it as “a lock of matted or dung-coated wool”. In Turkish the word means “mountain.” In Australasia, a dag is someone who dresses badly and has poor social skills. Thus one's interest might justifiably be piqued by the acronym “DAGMan.” Thankfully, DAGs have very little to do with types of dags to which we might be accustomed. In fact, a DAG is a Directed Acyclic Graph, a way of representing jobs and job dependencies. They are particularly useful when the input, output, or execution of one job is dependent on that of another.DAGMan is a piece of software tha

May 30, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Grid Power in Five Minutes?

  Feature - Grid Power in Five Minutes? Harald Kornmayer talks with Cristy Burne at this month's OGF20/EGEE User Forum in Manchester, UK.Image courtesy of Owen Appleton Start the clock. It is 16.23. Harald Kornmayer, spokesperson for the g-Eclipse project, has already drawn a crowd. His promise? Access to the computing power of the Grid in just five minutes.For those juggling the complexity of multiple stand-alone grid-based applications, Kornmayer offers something simple: g-Eclipse—a generic framework that allows users to incorporate many different tools via a standardized, customizable, intuitive interface. “We’re aiming to develop a general middleware-independent framework that can be easily used by all grid users, operators and application developers,” explains Kornmayer. “We’re also providing support for new applications, so new projects can speed up tool development and integration, reducing time-to-market and time-to-service.”The g-Eclipse project is funded by the European C

March 7, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Parallel evolution: DILIGENT & ETICS

Feature - Parallel Evolution: DILIGENT and ETICS Parallel evolution: two EU funded projects interacting for mutual benefit. Left, the ETICS interface. Right, watermarking and video curation, two functions of the DILIGENT system. Image courtesy of Owen Appleton DILIGENT and ETICS, two European Commission-funded projects that are leaders in the European Grid scene, recently achieved milestone releases of their software, thanks largely to their collaboration with each other.ETICS—E-infrastructure for Testing Integration and Configuration of Software—offers grid-enabled, automated building and testing of software. Just over a year after the project launched, their final release candidate was made public. The project’s service, however, has been in use for some time by several projects, including DILIGENT—a DIgital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technologies. “We started to use ETICS when it was three months old for our build and deployment testing activities,” explained DILIGENT’s Ped

January 31, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Glue for the Grid

Feature: GLUE for the Grid GLUE helps grid components stick together. A defining feature of a grid is that its components can change from minute to minute: storage, processors and sites join and leave, jobs start and finish and files are written and deleted. Resources can also vary widely, from disk to tape storage, different operating systems and processor types. But for the grid to work, the status and makeup of each of these contributions needs to be known, so that resources can be allocated to users, sites monitored and accounting data collected. For many of the world's scientific grids, this problem is solved by the Grid Laboratory Uniform Environment—or GLUE Schema. Many projects, such as Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid and the Open Science Grid, use GLUE. The GLUE Schema is a common way of publishing information, developed by consortium of grid projects, including EGEE, OSG, the Australian Part

November 22, 2006
iSGTW Feature - A Decade of Globus in Science

Feature: A Decade of Globus in Science
TeraShake 2 simulation of magnitude 7.7 earthquake, created by scientists at the Southern California Earthquake Center and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Simulation: SCEC scientists Kim Olsen, Steven Day, SDSU et al; Yifeng Cui et al, SDSC/UCSDVisualization: Amit Chourasia, SDSC/UCSD
Simulating tens of thousands of possible earthquakes shaking Los Angeles, blood flow
through realistic human arteries, or the effect of radiation treatment on cancerous tumors. Searching for new subatomic particles, predicting severe storms and hurricanes, or studying supernovae observed from many different telescopes.
Over the past ten years, grid computing and the Globus Toolkit have made these scientific research projects – and hundreds more like them – easier, faster, and in some cases possible for the very first time.
The first funding for work on Globus was granted in August 1996 by the U.S. Defens