Software for Managing Parametric Studies

The Information Power Grid Virtual Laboratory (ILab) is a Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (PERL) graphical-user-interface computer program that generates shell scripts to facilitate parametric studies performed on the Grid. (The Grid denotes a worldwide network of supercomputers used for scientific and engineering computations involving data sets too large to fit on desktop computers.) Heretofore, parametric studies on the Grid have been impeded by the need to create control language scripts and edit input data files painstaking tasks that are necessary for managing multiple jobs on multiple computers. ILab reflects an object-oriented approach to automation of these tasks: All data and operations are organized into packages in order to accelerate development and debugging. A container or document object in ILab, called an experiment, contains all the information (data and file paths) necessary to define a complex series of repeated, sequenced, and/or branching processes. For convenience and to enable reuse, this object is serialized to and from disk storage. At run time, the current ILab experiment is used to generate required input files and shell scripts, create directories, copy data files, and then both initiate and monitor the execution of all computational processes

Production-Level Distributed Parametric Study Capabilities for the Grid

Abstract. Though tools are available for creating and launching parameter studies in distributed environments, production-level users have shunned these tools for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, this is simply a result of the inability of these tools to provide anything more than a demonstration-level capability, rather than the flexibility and variety of industrial-strength capabilities that users actually require. In addition, despite the difficulties of creating parametric studies without specialized tools, users still demand that such tools be intuitive, easy to use, and versatile enough to support their particular experimental procedures. We show some solutions to real problems encountered in users ’ parametric experiments, and simultaneously show how the success of grid computing in general will rely on the ability of grid tool developers to provide a much greater level of capability and generality than users have seen in current grid-tool demonstrations.

ScyFlow: An Environment for the Visual Specification and Execution of Scientific Workflows, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience [this issue

With the advent of grid technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to utilize distributed grid resources. The core grid services provide a path for accessing and utilizing these resources in a secure and seamless fashion. However what the scientists need is an environment that will allow them to specify their application runs at a high organizational level, and then support efficient execution across any given set or sets of resources. We have been designing and implementing ScyFlow, a dual-interface architecture (both GUI and API) that addresses this problem. The scientist/user specifies the application tasks along with the necessary control and data flow, and monitors and manages the execution of the resulting workflow across the distributed resources. In this paper, we utilize two scenarios to provide the details of the two modules of the project, the visual editor and the runtime workflow engine

A Comparison of Parameter Study Creation and Job Submission Tools

We consider the differences between the available general purpose parameter study and job submission tools. These tools necessarily share many features, but frequently with differences in the way they are designed and implemented For this class of features, we will only briefly outline the essential differences. However we will focus on the unique features which distinguish the ILab parameter study and job submission tool from other packages, and which make the ILab tool easier and more suitable for use in our research and engineering environment