A Grid Portal for an Undergraduate Parallel Programming Course

[Abstract] This paper describes an experience of designing and implementing a portal to support transparent remote access to supercomputing facilities to students enrolled in an undergraduate parallel programming course. As these facilities are heterogeneous, are located at different sites, and belong to different institutions, grid computing technologies have been used to overcome these issues. The result is a grid portal based on a modular and easily extensible software architecture that provides a uniform and user-friendly interface for students to work on their programming laboratory assignments.Universidade da Coruña; UDC-TIC03-057Xunta de Galicia; PGIDIT02TIC00103CTXunta de Galicia; PGIDIT04TIC105004PREuropean Commission; IST-2001-3224

Deploying Web-based Visual Exploration Tools on the Grid

We discuss a web-based portal for the exploration, encapsulation, and dissemination of visualization results over the Grid. This portal integrates three components: an interface client for structured visualization exploration, a visualization web application to manage the generation and capture of the visualization results, and a centralized portal application server to access and manage grid resources. Our approach uses standard web technologies to make the system accessible with minimal user setup. We demonstrate the usefulness of the developed system using an example for Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data visualization

The research and development of ChemGrid in CGSP

With the rapid development of computing technologies and network technologies, Grid technology has emerged as the solution for high-performance computing. Recently, the grid of orient-services has become a hot issue in this research area. In this paper, we propose an architecture of ChemGrid in CGSP (China Grid Support Platform). The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is demonstrated by an example which is developed as a Web service based on CGSP; the Web service is used for searching elements in the periodic table. An improvement of the user interface for applications is proposed in order to obtain results interactively. Finally, an extension of ChemGrid is discussed in order to integrate different types of resources and provide specialized services.<br /

The GRB Library: Grid Computing with Globus in C

none5In this paper we describe a library layered on top of basic Globus services. The library provides high level services, can be used to develop both web-based and desktop grid applications, it is relatively small and very easy to use. We show its usefulness in the context of a web-based Grid Resource Broker developed using the library as a building block, and in the context of a metacomputing experiment demonstrated at the SuperComputing 2000 conference.Aloisio G.; Cafaro M.; Blasi E.; De Paolis L.; Epicoco I.Aloisio, Giovanni; Cafaro, Massimo; Blasi, E.; DE PAOLIS, Lucio Tommaso; Epicoco, Ital

Investigating a Science Gateway for an Agent-Based Simulation Application Using REPAST

The benefits of using e-Infrastructure environments, such as cloud, grid, and high performance computing, for performing scientific experiments could be quite significant. In particular, modeling and simulation, which can serve as a key decision making and system analysis tool, could benefit immensely from such environments ranging from issues of how a community of practice could access a simulation to how it could be run quickly. However, the access and use of these e-Infrastructure environments may present a completely different set of challenges, most especially for non-ICT users. Science Gateways (SG), which are digital interfaces to advanced technologies, can be used to overcome the challenges of running many simulations on e- Infrastructures in a reasonable amount of time. In this work, we developed a SG, based on the Liferay portal framework and the Catania grid and cloud engine. We show how an Agent- Based infection simulation, which has been implemented using the Recursive Porous Agent Simulation Toolkit (REPAST) Simphony, can be ported to a Science Gateway and deployed on distributed computing infrastructures. This demonstration illustrates how this technology can be used easily to allow multiple users across the world to access a simulation and to execute their applications in an e-Infrastructures environment.Special thanks go to the team at the University of Catania for their support and the provision of the infrastructures that enable the execution of our ABMS application jobs. This work was part-funded by the H2020 project Energising Scientific Endeavour through Science Gateways and e-Infrastructures in Africa (Sci-GaIA) (project number 654237)

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

Aplicaciones de búsquedas por similtud en un portal GRID orientado a aspectos

En el marco del Proyecto de Investigación Paralelización de Estructuras de Datos y Algoritmos para la Recuperación de Información, de la Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Austral se desarrolla la línea de investigación que da continuidad al trabajo previo de dos grupos de investigación de esa Universidad en las áreas de paralelismo y programación orientada a aspectos, integrados en esta oportunidad en la búsqueda de alternativas para la implementación del paradigma de orientación a aspectos en entornos paralelos, particularmente en entornos GRID, a través del desarrollo de un Portal GRID, utilizando técnicas y herramientas de la programación orientada a aspectos, y del área de búsquedas por similitud investigadas por un grupo de la Universidad de Magallanes, Chile, con el fin de desarrollar aplicaciones arqueológicas para el Portal GRID.Eje: Procesamiento Distribuido y ParaleloRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

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

Methods and Distributed Software for Visualization of Cracks Propagating in Discrete Particle Systems

Scientific visualization is becoming increasingly important in analyzing and interpreting numerical and experimental data sets. Parallel computations of discrete particle systems lead to large data sets that can be produced, stored and visualized on distributed IT infrastructures. However, this leads to very complicated environments handling complex simulation and interactive visualization on the remote heterogeneous architectures. In micro-structure of continuum, broken connections between neighbouring particles can form complex cracks of unknown geometrical shape. The complex disjoint surfaces of cracks with holes and unavailability of a suitable scalar field defining the crack surfaces limit the application of the common surface extraction methods. The main visualization task is to extract the surfaces of cracks according to the connectivity of the broken connections and the geometry of the neighbouring particles. The research aims at enhancing the visualization methods of discrete particle systems and increasing speed of distributed visualization software. The dissertation consists of introduction, three main chapters and general conclusions. In the first Chapter, a literature review on visualization software, distributed environments, discrete element simulation of particle systems and crack visualization methods is presented. In the second Chapter, novel visualization methods were proposed for extraction of crack surfaces from monodispersed particle systems modelled by the discrete element method. The cell cut-based method, the Voronoi-based method and cell centre-based method explicitly define geometry of propagating cracks in fractured regions. The proposed visualization methods were implemented in the grid visualization e–service VizLitG and the distributed visualization software VisPartDEM. Partial data set transfer from the grid storage element was developed to reduce the data transfer and visualization time. In the third Chapter, the results of experimental research are presented. The performance of e-service VizLitG was evaluated in a geographically distributed grid. Different types of software were employed for data transfer in order to present the quantitative comparison. The performance of the developed visualization methods was investigated. The quantitative comparison of the execution time of local Voronoi-based method and that of global Voronoi diagrams generated by Voro++ library was presented. The accuracy of the developed methods was evaluated by computing the total depth of cuts made in particles by the extracted crack surfaces. The present research confirmed that the proposed visualization methods and the developed distributed software were capable of visualizing crack propagation modelled by the discrete element method in monodispersed particulate media