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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
EU CLOSING IN ON TRANSPARENT GRID
A key objective of the ongoing European Union (EU) Grid program is to make
available large-scale, distributed resources capable of solving complex
processing problems. The environment, energy, health, transport and industrial
design are all likely application areas. At the end of 2003, the Grid
infrastructure was already a reality -- interconnecting national research
networks in Europe and across the world. The next question is -- how do
researchers access and use this huge resource?
One Of Largest Research Undertakings In Europe
Enabling this access is the task of the IST GRIDLAB project, scheduled to
deliver its results at the end of 2004. Led by the Poznan Supercomputer and
Networking center (PSNC) in Poland, the 11 partners in GRIDLAB are working to
provide Grid users with a simple and robust environment that allows them to
develop applications capable of exploiting the full power and capacity of the
Grid.
The project is one of the biggest research undertakings in Europe in the
development of application tools and middleware for the Grid environment. It
aims to produce a set of application-oriented Grid services such as dynamic
resource brokering, monitoring and data management for both end-users and
developers.
These services are accessed using the Grid Application Toolkit (GAT), a set
of
mechanisms (APIs) that provide applications with access to various Grid
resources, specific libraries, tools, etc., as well as to the GridLab services
themselves. GAT enables applications to make use of whatever resources on the
Grid, available at the start of the specific processing task. Thus, end-users
and application developers can develop and run applications on the Grid
without having to know in advance what the runtime environment will
provide.
Hiding The Complexity Of The Grid
"GAT hides the complexity of the Grid from the user," said project
coordinator
Jarek Nabrzyski of PSNC. "It makes the Grid transparent. Users don't have to
worry about which service or resource they are accessing -- they use the same
API. GAT chooses the best resource available automatically."
While GridLab researchers are making extensive use of specific application
frameworks (i.e. Cactus, Triana as application examples for developing
GridLab), GAT is designed to be useful for applications and users of all
types. It consists of an API, a library and a set of Grid middleware which
together allow applications to access Grid resources without the programr
having to learn the details of the underlying Grid middleware or its APIs.
As well as producing the GAT, GridLab researchers are developing and
testing
Grid applications on real testbeds, constructed by linking the different
supercomputers and other resources spanning the globe. So, in addition to EU
resources, production testbeds are being employed in the US to ensure full
interoperability. Testing is carried out by several large user communities,
including a European astrophysics network and various multidisciplinary United
States-funded consortia.
One GridLab service is noteworthy here. The Grid Resource Management System
(GRMS) is a service that offers more efficient management of user applications
in distributed Grid environments. It has already been tested on complex
application scenarios that access processing resources in computer centers
throughout Europe and the United States.
Already Demonstrated Successfully
GridLab has already demonstrated GAT and its associated services
successfully.
For example, at the Supercomputing 2003 conference, the GAT prototype and
underlying GridLab services were shown. It allowed generic applications to
migrate across different resources and machine architectures of the GridLab
testbed.
In this scenario, users launched production quality Cactus simulations
using
MPI and Fortran to model the collision in space of two black holes. The
purpose of the Cactus application is to study a variety of astrophysical
phenomena including black holes, colliding neutron stars, singularities,
gravitational waves and similar effects.
Such applications have a very high need for processing power, said
Nabrzyski.
"Simulating the collision of black holes in space, for example, can require
three weeks of computing on a one thousand processor machine. Using the Grid
enables us to make use of various distributed processing resources at the same
time, and decrease the time required by a factor of three to five."
He again stressed the importance of GAT for providing Grid access to
support
such processor-hungry applications. "The most important advantage for Grid
users is that they have a single tool that allows them to use the Grid in the
simplest possible way. That is the big advantage of GAT. People developing
their applications for the Grid can take the GAT and they have everything they
need."
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