Accounting Facilities in the European Supercomputing Grid DEISA

Account management and resource usage monitoring are essential services for production Grids. The scope of a production Grid infrastructure, the heterogeneity of resources and services, the typical community usage profiles, and the depth of integration of the resource providers regarding operational procedures and policies imply specific requirements for accounting facilities. We present the accounting facilities currently used in production in the Distributed European Infra-structure for the Supercomputing Applications (DEISA). DEISA is a consortium of leading national supercomputing centres currently deploying and operating a persistent, production quality, distributed su-percomputing environment with continental scope. The DEISA accounting facilities gather information from the site-local batch systems and the distributed DEISA user administration system, and generate XML usage records conforming to the OGF usage record specification which are then stored locally in a XML data base at each DEISA site. The distributed accounting information can be fetched by clients such as users, project supervisors, site accounting managers and DEISA supervisors. The information is made available by site-local WSRF-compliant accounting information services that allow for a fine-grained setting of access rights. Each authorized client gets a specific view on the accounting information according to one of the following roles: a) a site accounting manager imports usage records of related home-site users from all DEISA sites for longterm archiving, b) a project supervisor retrieves information to assess the resource usage by his project partners, c) a DEISA supervisor (e.g. someone overlooking the usage on behalf of the DEISA executive committee) gets a report on the global usage of DEISA resources, and d) the user who can retrieve all the accounting information related to his own jobs. The privacy and integrity of the data provided and transferred from the accounting information service running at each site is guaranteed using X.509 certificates for mutual authentication and secure communication channels

Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures

This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not complete, but we believe it is representative. Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap- plications by representing the infrastructures

European actions for High-Performance Computing: PRACE, DEISA and HPC-Europa

Between e-Infrastructures, ESFRI has identified in FP7 High- Performance Computing a strategic priority for Europe. In order to have the highest return from the associated massive economical and political commitment, HPC resources must be exploited at the highest level. Their access must be effective and capillary, their services must allow more and more people to use the resources, regardless their geographical location. Projects like PRACE, DEISA and HPC-Europa have been supported by the EU to cope with such issues providing the best solutions for the European research community

Towards a lightweight generic computational grid framework for biological research

Background: An increasing number of scientific research projects require access to large-scale computational resources. This is particularly true in the biological field, whether to facilitate the analysis of large high-throughput data sets, or to perform large numbers of complex simulations – a characteristic of the emerging field of systems biology. Results: In this paper we present a lightweight generic framework for combining disparate computational resources at multiple sites (ranging from local computers and clusters to established national Grid services). A detailed guide describing how to set up the framework is available from the following URL: http://igrid-ext.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/portal_guide/. Conclusion: This approach is particularly (but not exclusively) appropriate for large-scale biology projects with multiple collaborators working at different national or international sites. The framework is relatively easy to set up, hides the complexity of Grid middleware from the user, and provides access to resources through a single, uniform interface. It has been developed as part of the European ImmunoGrid project

Integrated monitoring of multi-domain backbone connections -- Operational experience in the LHC optical private network

Novel large scale research projects often require cooperation between various different project partners that are spread among the entire world. They do not only need huge computing resources, but also a reliable network to operate on. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is a representative example for such a project. Its experiments result in a vast amount of data, which is interesting for researchers around the world. For transporting the data from CERN to 11 data processing and storage sites, an optical private network (OPN) has been constructed. As the experiment data is highly valuable, LHC defines very high requirements to the underlying network infrastructure. In order to fulfil those requirements, the connections have to be managed and monitored permanently. In this paper, we present the integrated monitoring solution developed for the LHCOPN. We first outline the requirements and show how they are met on the single network layers. After that, we describe, how those single measurements can be combined into an integrated view. We cover design concepts as well as tool implementation highlights.Comment: International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC