30 research outputs found
Technical support for Life Sciences communities on a production grid infrastructure
Production operation of large distributed computing infrastructures (DCI)
still requires a lot of human intervention to reach acceptable quality of
service. This may be achievable for scientific communities with solid IT
support, but it remains a show-stopper for others. Some application execution
environments are used to hide runtime technical issues from end users. But they
mostly aim at fault-tolerance rather than incident resolution, and their
operation still requires substantial manpower. A longer-term support activity
is thus needed to ensure sustained quality of service for Virtual Organisations
(VO). This paper describes how the biomed VO has addressed this challenge by
setting up a technical support team. Its organisation, tooling, daily tasks,
and procedures are described. Results are shown in terms of resource usage by
end users, amount of reported incidents, and developed software tools. Based on
our experience, we suggest ways to measure the impact of the technical support,
perspectives to decrease its human cost and make it more community-specific.Comment: HealthGrid'12, Amsterdam : Netherlands (2012
GridCertLib: a Single Sign-on Solution for Grid Web Applications and Portals
This paper describes the design and implementation of GridCertLib, a Java
library leveraging a Shibboleth-based authentication infrastructure and the
SLCS online certificate signing service, to provide short-lived X.509
certificates and Grid proxies. The main use case envisioned for GridCertLib, is
to provide seamless and secure access to Grid/X.509 certificates and proxies in
web applications and portals: when a user logs in to the portal using
Shibboleth authentication, GridCertLib can automatically obtain a Grid/X.509
certificate from the SLCS service and generate a VOMS proxy from it. We give an
overview of the architecture of GridCertLib and briefly describe its
programming model. Its application to some deployment scenarios is outlined, as
well as a report on practical experience integrating GridCertLib into portals
for Bioinformatics and Computational Chemistry applications, based on the
popular P-GRADE and Django softwares.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure; final manuscript accepted for publication by the
"Journal of Grid Computing
A novel approach to user-steering in scientific workflows
From the scientist's perspective the workflow execution is like black boxes. The scientist submits the workflow and at the end, the result or a notification about failed completion is returned. Concerning long running experiments or when workflows are in experimental phase it may not be acceptable. Scientist may need to fine-tune and monitor their experiments. To support the scientist with special user interaction tool we introduced intervention points (iPoints) where the user takes over the control for a while and has the possibility to interfere, namely to change some parameters or data, or to stop, to restart the workflow or even to deviate from the original workflow model during enactment. We plan to implement our solution in IWIR \cite{plan2011} language which was targeted to provide interoperability between four existing well-known SWfMS within the framework of the SHIWA project
Web interface for generic grid jobs, Web4Grid
For a long time grid has been used practically only by large projects which can afford to have fine-tuned sophisticated interfaces for the researchers involved on these projects. Grid has the potential to be a key instrument for a wide variety of scientific topics which require to perform many calculations, for example to explore complex system dynamics as function of parameters. The reduced size of the research groups and the diversity of problems makes unsuitable to develop specific interfaces in most of the instances while the cumbersome grid shell commands are a barrier that requires a significant amount of determination to overcome. Web4Grid interface is intended to be a user-friendly web where grid users can submit their jobs and recover the results on an automatic way. Besides the interface provides the capability to monitor the existing jobs and to check the (local) grid status (load, number of free cores available,...). Web4Grid interface does not require specific grid usage training nor any knowledge about the middleware behind it.Financial support from CSIC through project GRID-CSIC (Ref . 200450E494) and from from MICINN (Spain) and FEDER (EU) through project FIS2 007-60327 (FISICOS) is acknowledged.Peer Reviewe
Web Interface for Generic Grid Jobs, Web4Grid
For a long time grid has been used practically only by large projects which can afford to have fine-tuned sophisticated interfaces for the researchers involved on these projects. Grid has the potential to be a key instrument for a wide variety of scientific topics which require to perform many calculations, for example to explore complex system dynamics as function of parameters. The reduced size of the research groups and the diversity of problems makes unsuitable to develop specific interfaces in most of the instances while the cumbersome grid shell commands are a barrier that requires a significant amount of determination to overcome. Web4Grid interface is intended to be a user-friendly web where grid users can submit their jobs and recover the results on an automatic way. Besides the interface provides the capability to monitor the existing jobs and to check the (local) grid status (load, number of free cores available, ...). Web4Grid interface does not require specific grid usage training nor any knowledge about the middleware behind it
Interoperating Grid Infrastructures with the GridWay Metascheduler
This paper describes the GridWay Metascheduler and exposes its latest and future developments, mainly related to interoperability and interoperation. GridWay enables large-scale, reliable and efficient sharing of computing resources over grid middleware. To favor interoperability, it shows a modular architecture based on drivers, which access middleware services for resource discovery and monitoring, job execution and management, and file transfer. This paper presents two new execution drivers for BES and CREAM services, and introduces a remote BES interface for GridWay. This interface allows users to access GridWay’s job metascheduling capabilities, using the BES implementation of GridSAM. Thus, GridWay now provides to end-users more possibilities of interoperability and interoperation
Фреймворк для розробки високорівневих Grid-застосувань
Розглянуто особливості використання Grid-середовища для вирішення різних типів обчислювальних завдань. Визначені вимоги до засобів розробки високорівневих Grid-застосувань та наведено результати дослідження існуючих. Запропоновано розширення архітектури відкритого фреймворку gUSE/WS-PGRADE сервісами оптимізації планування та виконання різних типів завдань у Grid-середовищі шляхом аналізу особливостей структури завдання, стану та QoS рівня ресурсів Grid-мережі