Computing environments for reproducibility: Capturing the 'Whole Tale'

The act of sharing scientific knowledge is rapidly evolving away from traditional articles and presentations to the delivery of executable objects that integrate the data and computational details (e.g., scripts and workflows) upon which the findings rely. This envisioned coupling of data and process is essential to advancing science but faces technical and institutional barriers. The Whole Tale project aims to address these barriers by connecting computational, data-intensive research efforts with the larger research process—transforming the knowledge discovery and dissemination process into one where data products are united with research articles to create “living publications” or tales. The Whole Tale focuses on the full spectrum of science, empowering users in the long tail of science, and power users with demands for access to big data and compute resources. We report here on the design, architecture, and implementation of the Whole Tale environment

1 Java CoG Kit Workflow

In order to satisfy the need for sophisticated experiment and simulation management solutions for the scientific user community, various frameworks must be provided. Such frameworks include APIs, services, templates, patterns, GUIs, command line tools, and workflow systems that are specifically addressed towards the goal of assisting in the complex process of experiment and simulation management. Workflow by itsel

A comparative performance analysis of the Java CoG Kit

The benefits offered by the Grid architecture has resulted in the tremendous growth of the Grid-user community. The Globus Toolkit has emerged as the most popular Grid implementation used by the Grid community. The Java CoG Kit provides a rich suite of artifacts and client-side constructs for Globus Toolkit 2 and 3 to access the backend Globus enabled Grid functionality. This paper is motivated by need to evaluate the tradeoffs, made by the underlying infrastructure, in choosing either a native Globus Toolkit client interface or a Java CoG Kit provided interface. This paper does not attempt to prove the superiority of one mechanism over the other, rather it offers decision aiding perfomance data to help client developers choose the appropriate service access mechanisms based on their application requirements

Abstracting the Grid

The Grid approach allows collaborative pooling of distributed resources across multiple domains. However, the benefits of the Grid are limited to those o#ered by the commodity application development framework used. Several elegant and flexible application development frameworks support only specific Grid architectures, thereby not allowing the applications to exploit the full potential of the Grid. In order to initiate community interest to standardize a high-level abstraction layer for di#erent Grid architectures, this paper introduces a collection of abstractions and data structures that collectively build a basis for an Open Grid Computing Environment

Ad Hoc Grid Security Infrastructure

Abstract — This paper describes an ad hoc Grid security infrastructure developed as a part of the Java CoG Kit project. It supports several requirements specific to the sporadic nature of ad hoc Grids. It focuses on identity management, identity verification, and authorization control in spontaneous Grid collaborations without pre-established policies or environments. It adopts established community standards, with modifications where needed. This paper also discusses the integration of the ad hoc Grid security infrastructure in an ad hoc Grid implementation. The implementation supports secure collaboration in ad hoc Grids using commodity technologies such as the Java CoG Kit, JXTA, GSI, and XACML. I

GridAnt: A Client-Controllable Grid Workflow System

Process management is an extremely important concept in both business and scientific communities. Several workflow management tools have been proposed in recent years offering advanced functionality in various domains. In the business world, workflow vendors offer commercial and customized solutions targeting specific users. In the scientific world, several open-source workflow management tools are freely available. However, they are directed toward service aggregation rather than distributed process management. Little consideration is given to the needs of the client in terms of mapping the process flow of the client. In the Grid community it is essential that the Grid users have such a tool available enabling them to orchestrate complex workflows on the fly without substantial help from the service providers. At the same time it is important that the Grid user not be burdened with the intricacies of the workflow system. With the perspective of the Grid user in mind, an extensible client-side workflow management system, called GridAnt, has been developed. This paper discusses the design principles, functionality, and application of the proposed GridAnt workflow manager.