Summer Scholarship Programme
Project

Project Title

 Extending the MHD ePortal

Project Supervisor(s)

 Rob Baxter, Lindsay Pottage, Gavin Pringle

Date of proposal

 2001/02/19 (updated 2001/06/29)

Project Details

 The Grid is billed as the future of top-end computing, the facilitator of a new computational science, eScience. The Grid purports to offer a seamless, ubiquitous computing environment in the same way that the Web today offers a seamless information environment. So much of the current work on Grid computing concentrates on systems-level difficulties, taking a bottom-up approach to building Grids. All well and good, but, one area of Grid computing that has attracted much less attention is arguably the most important: the user perspective. Building a globally-connected computing infrastructure is all very well, but who will use it, and for what? EPCC believes this use-case approach to Grid computing has been neglected, and with this in mind we are developing a Grid computing solution for a specific yet broad class of users: computational scientists who want to do science rather than computing.

EPCC are working with the UK Magneto-Hydrodynamics (MHD) consortium, funded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, to develop the prototype for a software toolkit to build a single "Universal Portal" for eScientists. The Portal will offer a single view of the range of available software packages for scientific simulations, in particular for some of the MHD consortium's solar physics codes. The MHD scientists will be able to select a computing service, including a "don't care where it runs" service, to run their particular jobs using their favourite package, but in a transparent way that frees them from the details of the computing and allows them to concentrate on the science. No matter whether their job runs on a Compaq Alpha cluster, a Cray T3E or a home-grown Beowulf system, their program interface will be the same, the details of job submission will be hidden, data format issues will be dealt with behind the scenes and the science will be brought to the fore.

A prototype ePortal system, built for the MHD consortium but designed to be extesible, already exists. The system architecture is based upon a three-tier generic client - portal - High Performance Computing (HPC) server structure, whereby a central core of services running on the ePortal site connects an arbitrary number of remote Web clients to sets of HPC servers. The system has been developed using Java and XML since these two technologies constitute the core of Web-based services today; Java providing the tools to develop secure, portable and platform-independent Web-based applications and XML their means of communication via structured, platform-independent data representation and exchange.

The system currently allows a user to login to the ePortal via a front-end Web browser, select a single MHD solar physics code and the Compaq Alpha cluster situated in St Andrews on which to run the code and specify the parameters for the job run. Once this information is submitted, the job parameters are sent to the portal tier and forwarded on to the Compaq Alpha cluster where the code is run accordingly and results are sent back to the portal for forwarding to the user via email.

This project proposes to extend the ePortal prototype as it currently stands in two main ways:

  1. Extend the back-end Portal services to include the EPCC Sun cluster (lomond) and Beowulf cluster (bobcat) in the list of HPC service providers;
  2. Extend both front- and back-end services to include additional code services for the MHD consortium.

Work Plan
Week 1: Courses
Week 2: Analysis of existing ePortal design and implementation
Week 3: Add Lomond to back-end Services module, add generic script to back-end.
Week 4: Extend ePortal design to incorporate Lare3d code and code new front-end panel
Week 5: Install PBS on Bobcat
Week 6 and 7: Design and implement ePortal interface to PBS system
Week 8: Integrate with ePortal system
Week 9: Test on Compaq, Bobcat and lomond
Week 10: Project writeup

Possible extra's

1: Develop script to generate generic panel components
2: Identify and integrate further codes

Computing Skills Required

Java

Knowledge of XML would be useful, as would knowledge of RMI and sockets programming. Also knowledge of UML.

Training Required

An introduction to OO design using UML.

Computing Resources

Solaris workstation, Bobcat

Webpage maintained by mario@epcc.ed.ac.uk