Enabling Applications on the Grid: A Gridlab Overview

Abstract

Grid technology is widely emerging. Still, there is an eminent shortage of real Grid users, mostly due to the lack of a “critical mass” of widely deployed and reliable higher-level Grid services, tailored to application needs. The GridLab project aims to provide fundamentally new capabilities for applications to exploit the power of Grid computing, thus bridging the gap between application needs and existing Grid middleware. We present an overview of GridLab, a large-scale, EU-funded Grid project spanning over a dozen groups in Europe and the US. We first outline our vision of Grid-empowered applications and then discuss GridLab’s general architecture and its Grid Application Toolkit (GAT). We illustrate how applications can be Grid-enabled with the GAT and discuss GridLab’s scheduler as an example of GAT services.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Allen, G. et al., May 2001. Early experiences with the EGrid testbed . In First IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, Brisbane, Australia, pp. 130–137 .

Brzezinski, J., et al., July 2002. Technical Specification of the GridLab Resource Management System. http://www.gridlab.org/Resources/Deliverables/D9.2.pdf.

Foster, I., Kesselman, C., Nick, J.M., and Tuecke, S., June 2002. The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems Integration. Draft document, http://www.globus.org/research/papers/ogsa.pdf.

Gallopoulos, E., Houstis, E., and Rice, J., 1994. Computer As Thinker/Doer: Problem-Solving Environments for Computational Science . IEEE Computational Science and Engineering 1(2): 11—23 .

Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., and Vlissides, J., 1995. Design Patterns, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA .

Goodale, T., Allen, G., Lanfermann, G., Massó, J., Radke, T., Seidel, E., and Shalf, J., 2003. The Cactus Framework and Toolkit: Design and Applications . In Vector and Parallel Processing—VECPAR’2002,5th International Conference, Berlin, Germany, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin.

Smith, W., Foster, I., and Taylor, V., 2000. Scheduling with Advanced Reservations . In Proceedings of the IPDPS Conference, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, pp. 127—132 .

Taylor, I., Shields, M., and Philp, R., 2002. GridOneD: Peer to Peer visualization using Triana: A Galaxy Formation Test Case . In Proceedings of the UK eScience “All Hands Meeting”, September 2–4, Sheffield, UK.

Tuecke, S., Foster, I., and Kesselman, C., 2001. The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations . International Journal of Supercomputer Applications 15(3).