Architectural Tradeoffs for Unifying Campus Grid Resources

Most universities have a powerful collection of computing resources on campus for use in areas from high performance computing to general access student labs. However, these resources are rarely used to their full potential. Grid computing offers a way to unify these resources and to better utilize the capability they provide. The complexity of some grid tools makes learning to use them a daunting task for users not familiar with using the command line. Combining these tools together into a single web portal interface provides campus faculty and students with an easy way to access the campus resources. This paper presents some of the grid and portal tools that are currently available and tradeoffs in their selection and use. The successful implementation of a subset of these tools at the University of Arkansas and the functionality they provide are discussed in detail

The Open Grid Computing Environments collaboration: portlets and services for science gateways

We review the efforts of the Open Grid Computing Environments collaboration. By adopting a general three-tiered architecture based on common standards for portlets and Grid Web services, we can deliver numerous capabilities to science gateways from our diverse constituent efforts. In this paper, we discuss our support for standards-based Grid portlets using the Velocity development environment. Our Grid portlets are based on abstraction layers provided by the Java CoG kit, which hide the differences of different Grid toolkits. Sophisticated services are decoupled from the portal container using Web service strategies. We describe advance information, semantic data, collaboration, and science application services developed by our consortium. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/56029/1/1078_ftp.pd

Final Report for DOE Project: Portal Web Services: Support of DOE SciDAC Collaboratories

Grid portals provide the scientific community with familiar and simplified interfaces to the Grid and Grid services, and it is important to deploy grid portals onto the SciDAC grids and collaboratories. The goal of this project is the research, development and deployment of interoperable portal and web services that can be used on SciDAC National Collaboratory grids. This project has four primary task areas: development of portal systems; management of data collections; DOE science application integration; and development of web and grid services in support of the above activities

A lightweight Web interface to Grid scheduling systems

Grid computing is often out of reach for the very scientists who need these resources because of the complexity of popular middleware suites. Some effort has gone into abstracting away these complexities using graphical user interfaces, some of which have been Web-based. This paper presents a lightweight and portable interface for Grid management, that is made possible using recent advances in dynamic technologies for Web applications. Case studies are presented to demonstrate that this interface is both usable and useful. An analysis of usage then highlights some positive and negative aspects of this approach

Service Based Marketplace for Applications

The Grid has revolutionized the way computations are done on the Internet. Access to remote computational resources and ad hoc creation of virtual organizations across administrative domains opens new opportunities on the Grid. The newly developed web services based Open Grid Services Architecture makes the Grid more accessible by allowing the Grid to be constructed from distinct platform independent components. Together they provide an environment for application sharing (or trading), collaborations and access to remote data repositories. The application marketplace is a natural extension to this application sharing environment. The marketplace addresses the fact that the existing infrastructure is still incomplete without provisions for publishing and discovering applications and resources, including the application descriptors that must be moved between the market participants. This work demonstrates a web service instance-based infrastructure, the application market that allows the sellers, the application and the CPU providers to publish their applications for the users to find and use. The application market uses a portal architecture built on top of Globus toolkit 3.0 that interacts with the providers and the users. The market services provide distinct interfaces that allow providers to advertise applications and users to select, configure, and run these applications. The applications themselves are modeled as stateful objects represented using XML which can be exchanged between the providers and users when required. The marketplace, through its interfaces, effectively hides the compute resource and application complexity thus allowing end users to explore and use applications unfamiliar to them with ease

A Lightweight Interface to Local Grid Scheduling Systems

Many computationally intensive research problems can be addressed using a Grid architecture. However, Grid use is restricted to those who have an in-depth knowledge of its complex architecture and functionality. To make Grid computing more accessible, a lightweight Web 2.0 interface to the scheduling systems on which Grids rely, and which can serve as an abstraction of a large Grid environment, was built. The purpose of this interface was to simplify many of the complexities associated with using Grid architectures. A case study is used to demonstrate the applicability of the interface to a problem that can be solved using a Grid, while a user study demonstrates how users, with little or no experience using Grids, were able to accomplish tasks using the Grid. Lastly, it is shown that the Web 2.0 interface can outperform traditional static interfaces in terms of response time and bandwidth efficiency

GUISET: A CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF A GRID-ENABLED PORTAL FOR E-COMMERCE ON-DEMAND SERVICES

Conventional grid-enabled portal designs have been largely influenced by the usual functional requirements such as security requirements, grid resource requirements and job management requirements. However, the pay-as-you-use service provisioning model of utility computing platforms mean that additional requirements must be considered in order to realize effective grid-enabled portals design for such platforms. This work investigates those relevant additional requirements that must be considered for the design of grid-enabled portals for utility computing contexts. Based on a thorough review of literature, we identified a number of those relevant additional requirements, and developed a grid-enabled portal prototype for the Grid-based Utility Infrastructure for SMME-enabling Technology (GUISET) initiative – a utility computing platform. The GUISET portal was designed to cater for both the traditional grid requirements and some of the relevant additional requirements for utility computing contexts. The result of the evaluation of the GUISET portal prototype using a set of benchmark requirements (standards) revealed that it fulfilled the minimum requirements to be suitable for the utility context

A lightweight interface to local Grid scheduling systems

Many complex research problems require an immense amount of computational power to solve. In order to solve such problems, the concept of the computational Grid was conceived. Although Grid technology is hailed as the next great enabling technology in Computer Science, the last being the inception of the World Wide Web, some concerns have to be addressed if this technology is going to be successful. The main difference between the Web and the Grid in terms of adoption is usability. The Web was designed with both functionality and end-users in mind, whereas the Grid has been designed solely with functionality in mind. Although large Grid installations are operational around the globe, their use is restricted to those who have an in-depth knowledge of its complex architecture and functionality. Such technology is therefore out of reach for the very scientists who need these resources because of its sheer complexity. The Grid is likely to succeed as a tool for some large-scale problem solving as there is no alternative on a similar scale. However, in order to integrate such systems into our daily lives, just as the Web has been, such systems need to be accessible to ``novice'' users. Without such accessibility, the use and growth of such systems will remain constrained. This dissertation details one possible way of making the Grid more accessible, by providing high-level access to the scheduling systems on which Grids rely. Since ``the Grid'' is a mechanism of transferring control of user submitted jobs to third-party scheduling systems, high-level access to the schedulers themselves was deemed to be a natural place to begin usability enhancing efforts. In order to design a highly usable and intuitive interface to a Grid scheduling system, a series of interviews with scientists were conducted in order to gain insight into the way in which supercomputing systems are utilised. Once this data was gathered, a paper-based prototype system was developed. This prototype was then evaluated by a group of test subjects who set out to criticise the interface and make suggestions as to where it could be improved. Based on this new data, the final prototype was developed firstly on paper and then implemented in software. The implementation makes use of lightweight Web 2.0 technologies. Designing lightweight software allows one to make use of the dynamic properties of Web technologies and thereby create more usable interfaces that are also visually appealing. Finally, the system was once again evaluated by another group of test subjects. In addition to user evaluations, performance experiments and real-world case studies were carried out on the interface. This research concluded that a dynamic Web 2.0-inspired interface appeals to a large group of users and allows for greater flexibility in the way in which data, in this case technical data, is presented. In terms of usability- the focal point of this research- it was found that it is possible to build an interface to a Grid scheduling system that can be used by users with no technical Grid knowledge. This is a significant outcome, as users were able to submit jobs to a Grid without fully comprehending the complexities involved with such actions, yet understanding the task they were required to perform. Finally, it was found that the use of a lightweight approach in terms of bandwidth usage and response time is superior to the traditional HTML-only approach. In this particular implementation of the interface, the benefits of using a lightweight approach are realised approximately halfway through a typical Grid job submission cycle

Implementación de un servidor para videoconferencia conectado a un Grid de procesamiento a través de la red avanzada para los proyectos tele-enfermería, tele-salud, aplicaciones prácticas en enseñanza y tele-consultas y entrenamiento virtual para medicina

La aparición de las nuevas tecnologías ha sido causada entre muchos motivos por la necesidad del ser humano de comunicarse con otras personas que no están cerca. Con el desarrollo tecnológico, la comunicación a distancia ha ido evolucionando utilizando redes cada vez mas rápidas y de mejor desempeño como Redes Avanzadas (Internet 2). Las distancias que separan a los participantes de la calidad y cantidad de información que se quiere transmitir es uno de los motivos que ha hecho que la forma de comunicarse a distancia progrese con el tiempo. En estudios se ha demostrado que en toda comunicación entre una o varias personas, influye no sólo lo que se dice, sino como se dice. Cuando se habla cara a cara con otra persona se obtiene mucha más información de sus expresiones faciales que de las palabras que dirigen a una persona. Estudios psicológicos aseguran que “cuando se habla cara a cara, sólo el siete por ciento de lo que es comunicado es transferido por el significado de las palabras. Otro treinta y ocho por ciento proviene de cómo las palabras son dichas. Eso deja al cincuenta y cinco por ciento restantes de la comunicación, tomar la forma de señales visuales” Por este motivo los sistemas de videoconferencias y visualización son métodos de comunicación que están en auge, por permitir ahorro de tiempo y gastos que involucran el traslado de personas a una reunión en un lugar distante. Esta investigación se centra en el ámbito educativo por ejemplo: la tele enfermería utilizando herramientas de videoconferencia y visualización conectada a clúster que permiten simulaciones y una amplia gama de opciones de manejo de imágenes, mejorando la calidad, elaboración y presentación de una clase. Permitiendo a profesionales de esta u otras áreas compartir conocimientos alrededor de todo el mundo, ya que un alumno que está viendo al profesor impartir su clase entiende mejor la información, que uno que simplemente está leyendo los apuntes o material de un curso especifico. A continuación se describe la investigación y las herramientas utilizadas para la consecución del presente proyecto