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SSP Project Summary
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Investigating Globus and GRID technologies
Student
Golestan Radwan, University of Cairo
Supervisors
Paul Graham, EPCC
Connor Mulholland, EPCC
Globus is a multi-institutional research and development project
focussed on enabling the applications of grid concepts to scientific
and engineering computing.
The project is organised around 4 main areas :
- Research - which targets challenges in areas such as
communication, scheduling, security, information, data access and
fault detection.
- Tools - focussed on the development of robust prototype software
to run on a wide range of interesting and important platforms. This
"bag of services" known as the Globus Toolkit forms a central element
of the Globus system and defines the basic services and capabilities
required to construct a computational grid.
- Testbeds - which involves the construction of large-scale,
prototype computational grids or testbeds using the basic technology
and tools developed.
- Applications - focussed on developing large-scale grid-enabled
applications in collaboration with application scientists.
EPCC have carried out initial testing with the Globus Toolkit on a
number of internal resources including a number of the Ultra-5s, the
beowulf cluster (BOBCAT) and the Cray T3E. Although these tests have
had limited success, further research and investigation is required to
fully understand and appreciate the "bag of services" on offer from
the Globus Toolkit.
The SSP project should achieve two goals :
- Investigation of a metacomputing application that makes use of
Globus. A good example would be Cactus, as this would be considered
worthwhile and valuable given EPCC's involvement within EGRID
activities.
- Research into and possibly implemention of a layer on top of
Globus that allows Globus to run on arbitrary machines. Making choices
about which resources to use is a task that the "broker" is
responsible for in the Globus architecture. However, no broker is
included in the Globus Toolkit.Brokers do exist though, apparently in
Nimrod-G and Condor-G, where they have constructed a layer on top of
Globus to perform this functionality.The idea would be to investigate
and report on these applications and then possibly implement a layer
pending the outcome of the research.
The final report for this project is available here.
Webpage maintained by
mario@epcc.ed.ac.uk