Checkpointing of parallel applications in a Grid environment

The Grid environment is generic, heterogeneous, and dynamic with lots of unreliable resources making it very exposed to failures. The environment is unreliable because it is geographically dispersed involving multiple autonomous administrative domains and it is composed of a large number of components. Examples of failures in the Grid environment can be: application crash, Grid node crash, network failures, and Grid system component failures. These types of failures can affect the execution of parallel/distributed application in the Grid environment and so, protections against these faults are crucial. Therefore, it is essential to develop efficient fault tolerant mechanisms to allow users to successfully execute Grid applications. One of the research challenges in Grid computing is to be able to develop a fault tolerant solution that will ensure Grid applications are executed reliably with minimum overhead incurred. While checkpointing is the most common method to achieve fault tolerance, there is still a lot of work to be done to improve the efficiency of the mechanism. This thesis provides an in-depth description of a novel solution for checkpointing parallel applications executed on a Grid. The checkpointing mechanism implemented allows to checkpoint an application at regions where there is no interprocess communication involved and therefore reducing the checkpointing overhead and checkpoint size

Security mechanisms for legacy code applications in GT3 environment

There are many legacy code applications that cannot be run in Grid environment without significant modifications. To avoid re-engineering of legacy code, we developed the Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Architecture (GEMLCA) that enables deployment of legacy code applications as Grid services. GEMLCA is an OGSI Grid service layer that supports submitting jobs, getting their results and status back. Security requirements are essential to any Grid application to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of data. To meet these requirements the GT3 security model was implemented in GEMLCA. The paper introduces GEMLCA and how Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) components have been added to GEMLCA in order to enable secure execution of jobs in Grid. The paper also presents how a legacy code traffic simulator was transformed into a Grid service using GEMLCA and gives some simulation results

Experiences with Publishing and Executing Parallel Legacy Code

In order to deploy existing scientific or business applications on a service-based Grid requires the transformation of these legacy code programs into Grid services. GEMLCA (Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Architecture) represents a solution to make available and execute legacy applications through an OGSI Grid service without re-engineering the original code. GEMLCA is a client front-end OGSI Grid service layer that offers a number of interfaces to submit and check the status of computational jobs, and get the results back. This paper describes the GEMLCA architecture and life-cycle, and outlines the current state of implementation