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

Polish grid infrastructure for science and research

Structure, functionality, parameters and organization of the computing Grid in Poland is described, mainly from the perspective of high-energy particle physics community, currently its largest consumer and developer. It represents distributed Tier-2 in the worldwide Grid infrastructure. It also provides services and resources for data-intensive applications in other sciences.Comment: Proceeedings of IEEE Eurocon 2007, Warsaw, Poland, 9-12 Sep. 2007, p.44

Grid-enabling FIRST: Speeding up simulation applications using WinGrid

The vision of grid computing is to make computational power, storage capacity, data and applications available to users as readily as electricity and other utilities. Grid infrastructures and applications have traditionally been geared towards dedicated, centralized, high performance clusters running on UNIX flavour operating systems (commonly referred to as cluster-based grid computing). This can be contrasted with desktop-based grid computing which refers to the aggregation of non-dedicated, de-centralized, commodity PCs connected through a network and running (mostly) the Microsoft Windowstrade operating system. Large scale adoption of such Windowstrade-based grid infrastructure may be facilitated via grid-enabling existing Windows applications. This paper presents the WinGridtrade approach to grid enabling existing Windowstrade based commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs). Through the use of a case study developed in conjunction with Ford Motor Company, the paper demonstrates how experimentation with the CSP Witnesstrade and FIRST can achieve a linear speedup when WinGridtrade is used to harness idle PC computing resources. This, combined with the lessons learned from the case study, has encouraged us to develop the Web service extensions to WinGridtrade. It is hoped that this would facilitate wider acceptance of WinGridtrade among enterprises having stringent security policies in place

Resource provisioning in Science Clouds: Requirements and challenges

Cloud computing has permeated into the information technology industry in the last few years, and it is emerging nowadays in scientific environments. Science user communities are demanding a broad range of computing power to satisfy the needs of high-performance applications, such as local clusters, high-performance computing systems, and computing grids. Different workloads are needed from different computational models, and the cloud is already considered as a promising paradigm. The scheduling and allocation of resources is always a challenging matter in any form of computation and clouds are not an exception. Science applications have unique features that differentiate their workloads, hence, their requirements have to be taken into consideration to be fulfilled when building a Science Cloud. This paper will discuss what are the main scheduling and resource allocation challenges for any Infrastructure as a Service provider supporting scientific applications

New science on the Open Science Grid

The Open Science Grid (OSG) includes work to enable new science, new scientists, and new modalities in support of computationally based research. There are frequently significant sociological and organizational changes required in transformation from the existing to the new. OSG leverages its deliverables to the large-scale physics experiment member communities to benefit new communities at all scales through activities in education, engagement, and the distributed facility. This paper gives both a brief general description and specific examples of new science enabled on the OSG. More information is available at the OSG web site: www.opensciencegrid.org

Towards a cyberinfrastructure for enhanced scientific

Scientific and technological collaboration is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. A February 2003 report to the U.S. NSF Directorate of Computer and Information System Engineering urged that funding be provided for a major enhancement of computer and network technologies, thereby creating a cyberinfrastructure whose facilities would support and transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research. The argument of this paper is that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve such an outcome; success in realizing the cyberinfrastructure’s potential, if it is achieved, will more likely to be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legal and technical transformations. The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration that is to say, its supposedly “softer” parts -- are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges facing “e- Science” will be seen to lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures created by the existing legal and administrative regimes. Although a number of these same conditions and circumstances appear to be equally significant obstacles to commercial provision of Grid services in interorganizational contexts, the domain of publicly supported scientific collaboration is held to be the more hospitable environment in which to experiment with a variety of new approaches to solving these problems. The paper concludes by proposing several “solution modalities,” including some that also could be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcends organizational boundaries.

Towards a cyberinfrastructure for enhanced scientific

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises to enable more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. A recent (February 2003) report to the U.S. NSF Directorate of Computer and Information System Engineering urged that funding be provided for a major enhancement of computer and network technologies, thereby creating a cyberinfrastructure whose facilities would support and transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research. The articulation of this programmatic vision reflects a widely shared expectation that solving the technical engineering problems associated with the advanced hardware and software systems of the cyberinfrastructure will yield revolutionary payoffs by empowering individual researchers and increasing the scale, scope and flexibility of collective research enterprises. The argument of this paper, however, is that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve such an outcome; success in realizing the cyberinfrastructure’s potential, if it is achieved, will more likely to be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legal and technical transformations. The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting collaboration – that is to say, its supposedly “softer” parts -- are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges facing “e-Science” will be seen to lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures created by the existing legal and administrative regimes. Although a number of these same conditions and circumstances appear to be equally significant obstacles to commercial provision of Grid services in interorganizational contexts, the domain of publicly supported scientific collaboration is held to be the more hospitable environment in which to experiment with a variety of new approaches to solving these problems. The paper concludes by proposing several “solution modalities,” including some that also could be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcends organizational boundaries.