The first Year of LHC Physics Analysis Using the Grid: Prospects from CMS

The CMS computing model has been distributed since early in the experiment preparation. In order for the experiment to succeed, CMS needs to develop efficient distributed analysis techniques using grid services. CMS has an active program of development and deployment to ensure the experiment can perform analysis using a worldwide infrastructure of computing clusters already at the beginning of LHC operation. In this presentation the status, plans, and prospects for CMS analysis using the grid are outlined

An Active Reliable Multicast Framework for the Grids

Computational Grids are foreseen to be one of the most critical yet challenging technologies to meet the exponentially growing demands for high-performance computing in a large variety of scientific disciplines. Most of these grid applications imply multiple participants and in many cases make an intensive usage of data distribution and collective opertaions. In this paper, we propose a multicast framework consisting of an active reliable protocol with specialized active services located at the edges of the core network for providing low-latency and low-overhead multicast transfers on computational grid

Video streaming with quality adaption using collaborative active grid networks

Due to the services and demands of the end users, Distributed Computing (Grid Technology, Web Services, and Peer-to-Peer) has been developedrapidJy in thelastyears. Theconvergence of these architectures has been possible using mechanisms such as Collaborative work and Resources Sharing. Grid computing is a platform to enable flexible, secure, controlled, scalable, ubiquitous and heterogeneous services. On the other hand, Video Streaming applications demand a greater deployment over connected Internet users. The present work uses the Acti ve Grid technology as a fundamental platform to give a solution of multimediacontentrecovery. This solution takes into account the following key concepts: collaborative work, multi-source recovery and adapti ve quality. A new archi tecture is designed to deliver video content over a Grid Network. The acti ve and passi ve roles of the nodes are important to guarantee a high quality and efficiency for the video streaming system. The acti ve sender nodes are the content suppliers, while the passive sender nodes wiU perform the backup functions, based on global resource control policies. The aim of the backup node is minirnize the time to restore the systemin caseoffailures. In this way, all participant peers work in a collaborati ve manner following a mul ti -source recovery scheme. Furthermore, Video La yered Encoding is used to manage the video data in a high scalable way, di viding the video in multiple layers. This video codification scheme enables thequality adaptation according to the availability of system resources. In addition, a buffer by sender peer and by layer is needed for an effecti ve control ofthe video retrieve. The QoS will fit considering the state of each buffer and the measurement tools provide by the Acti ve Grid on the network nodes. Ke ywords: Peer -to-Peer Grid Architecture, Services for Active Grids, Streaming Media, Layered Coding, Quality Adaptation, CoUaborative Work.Peer Reviewe

Video streaming with quality adaption using collaborative active grid networks

Due to the services and demands of the end users, Distributed Computing (Grid Technology, Web Services, and Peer-to-Peer) has been developedrapidJy in thelastyears. Theconvergence of these architectures has been possible using mechanisms such as Collaborative work and Resources Sharing. Grid computing is a platform to enable flexible, secure, controlled, scalable, ubiquitous and heterogeneous services. On the other hand, Video Streaming applications demand a greater deployment over connected Internet users. The present work uses the Acti ve Grid technology as a fundamental platform to give a solution of multimediacontentrecovery. This solution takes into account the following key concepts: collaborative work, multi-source recovery and adapti ve quality. A new archi tecture is designed to deliver video content over a Grid Network. The acti ve and passi ve roles of the nodes are important to guarantee a high quality and efficiency for the video streaming system. The acti ve sender nodes are the content suppliers, while the passive sender nodes wiU perform the backup functions, based on global resource control policies. The aim of the backup node is minirnize the time to restore the systemin caseoffailures. In this way, all participant peers work in a collaborati ve manner following a mul ti -source recovery scheme. Furthermore, Video La yered Encoding is used to manage the video data in a high scalable way, di viding the video in multiple layers. This video codification scheme enables thequality adaptation according to the availability of system resources. In addition, a buffer by sender peer and by layer is needed for an effecti ve control ofthe video retrieve. The QoS will fit considering the state of each buffer and the measurement tools provide by the Acti ve Grid on the network nodes. Ke ywords: Peer -to-Peer Grid Architecture, Services for Active Grids, Streaming Media, Layered Coding, Quality Adaptation, CoUaborative Work.Peer Reviewe

Service-Oriented Ad Hoc Grid Computing

Subject of this thesis are the design and implementation of an ad hoc Grid infrastructure. The vision of an ad hoc Grid further evolves conventional service-oriented Grid systems into a more robust, more flexible and more usable environment that is still standards compliant and interoperable with other Grid systems. A lot of work in current Grid middleware systems is focused on providing transparent access to high performance computing (HPC) resources (e.g. clusters) in virtual organizations spanning multiple institutions. The ad hoc Grid vision presented in this thesis exceeds this view in combining classical Grid components with more flexible components and usage models, allowing to form an environment combining dedicated HPC-resources with a large number of personal computers forming a "Desktop Grid". Three examples from medical research, media research and mechanical engineering are presented as application scenarios for a service-oriented ad hoc Grid infrastructure. These sample applications are also used to derive requirements for the runtime environment as well as development tools for such an ad hoc Grid environment. These requirements form the basis for the design and implementation of the Marburg ad hoc Grid Environment (MAGE) and the Grid Development Tools for Eclipse (GDT). MAGE is an implementation of a WSRF-compliant Grid middleware, that satisfies the criteria for an ad hoc Grid middleware presented in the introduction to this thesis. GDT extends the popular Eclipse integrated development environment by components that support application development both for traditional service-oriented Grid middleware systems as well as ad hoc Grid infrastructures such as MAGE. These development tools represent the first fully model driven approach to Grid service development integrated with infrastructure management components in service-oriented Grid computing. This thesis is concluded by a quantitative discussion of the performance overhead imposed by the presented extensions to a service-oriented Grid middleware as well as a discussion of the qualitative improvements gained by the overall solution. The conclusion of this thesis also gives an outlook on future developments and areas for further research. One of these qualitative improvements is "hot deployment" the ability to install and remove Grid services in a running node without interrupt to other active services on the same node. Hot deployment has been introduced as a novelty in service-oriented Grid systems as a result of the research conducted for this thesis. It extends service-oriented Grid computing with a new paradigm, making installation of individual application components a functional aspect of the application. This thesis further explores the idea of using peer-to-peer (P2P networking for Grid computing by combining a general purpose P2P framework with a standard compliant Grid middleware. In previous work the application of P2P systems has been limited to replica location and use of P2P index structures for discovery purposes. The work presented in this thesis also uses P2P networking to realize seamless communication accross network barriers. Even though the web service standards have been designed for the internet, the two-way communication requirement introduced by the WSRF-standards and particularly the notification pattern is not well supported by the web service standards. This defficiency can be answered by mechanisms that are part of such general purpose P2P communication frameworks. Existing security infrastructures for Grid systems focus on protection of data during transmission and access control to individual resources or the overall Grid environment. This thesis focuses on security issues within a single node of a dynamically changing service-oriented Grid environment. To counter the security threads arising from the new capabilities of an ad hoc Grid, a number of novel isolation solutions are presented. These solutions address security issues and isolation on a fine-grained level providing a range of applicable basic mechanisms for isolation, ranging from lightweight system call interposition to complete para-virtualization of the operating systems

High-Performance Cloud Computing: A View of Scientific Applications

Scientific computing often requires the availability of a massive number of computers for performing large scale experiments. Traditionally, these needs have been addressed by using high-performance computing solutions and installed facilities such as clusters and super computers, which are difficult to setup, maintain, and operate. Cloud computing provides scientists with a completely new model of utilizing the computing infrastructure. Compute resources, storage resources, as well as applications, can be dynamically provisioned (and integrated within the existing infrastructure) on a pay per use basis. These resources can be released when they are no more needed. Such services are often offered within the context of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which ensure the desired Quality of Service (QoS). Aneka, an enterprise Cloud computing solution, harnesses the power of compute resources by relying on private and public Clouds and delivers to users the desired QoS. Its flexible and service based infrastructure supports multiple programming paradigms that make Aneka address a variety of different scenarios: from finance applications to computational science. As examples of scientific computing in the Cloud, we present a preliminary case study on using Aneka for the classification of gene expression data and the execution of fMRI brain imaging workflow.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, conference pape