The Grid Computing Weblog

Back to Grid Blogging - OGF, Airbus deal

2006-07-16T14:22:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

Recently, I have been busy at work so stopped blogging for a while. During the period of inactivity, there had been numerous news items and grid related activities that I have been starring in my reader and mails.

EGA - GGF Merger: EGA and GGF, the two mainstream standard groups which have been discussing about a merger for soem time now, have finally merged to form a new entity Open Grid Forum (OGF). OGF Website is still under construction and the Board of Directors and leadership teams are yet to be finalized.
The Sci-Tech Today has the following comments:
Mark Linesch, who will lead the group, said the OGF would "open new doors to scientific discovery, business value and commercial adoption worldwide."
Experts welcomed the end of the groups' prolonged sparring over definitions and semantics.
Instead of quoting more, I am providing a link of related resource for the interested readers:
- Open Grid Forum: Necessary ... but Sufficient? (by Ian Lumb)
- Interview with Mark Linesch, President and CEO, Open Grid Forum (by Derrick Harris)

Airbus into Grid Computing: Grid Today in a news story reports that Fujitsu Systems has received order from Airbus for SynfiniWay HPC Grid middleware
SynfiniWay proved to have the most complete and integrated Grid computing solution for aerodynamics analyses at Airbus, combining service-oriented applications with open workflow capabilities for efficient support of complex dynamic processes.

Fujitsu Systems Europe has also been contracted to develop the services around the aerodynamic applications, and to integrate SynfiniWay within the existing user desktop tools for transparent grid access.
A good Computational Grid Intro: I came across this well written state of affairs of Computational Grid by Tim Bray in his ongoing weblog.

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Grid Computing Books: Grid Computing - The Savvy Manager’s Guide

2006-05-24T22:53:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

Title: Grid Computing - The Savvy Manager's Guide
Authors: Pawel Plaszczak & Rich Wellner, Jr.
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 0127425039
Sample Chapter: N/A
Online Companion: http://www.savvygrid.com/
Review: Taken from the online edition of Primeur

The book starts with some artificial, business cases, explaining how Grid technologies could be useful in business. Then it continues with Grid basics, including notes on the history: Grid computing is not a completely new invention, but builds on a number of developments in the nineties, such as metacomputing and distribtued computing.

The book is meant as a starting point. The reader is presented an overview of some resources for futher investigation, and there is a supporting web site which is kept up to date and with some links per chapter to other sources. However, when reading a book, I prefer the references to be contained in the book: you do not always have Internet at hand and it also disrupts the reading process if you first have to go to a computer to read the reference.

Another review from http://www.agapea.com/Grid-Computing-The-Savvy-Manager-s-Guide-n243334i.htm:

A decade ago, the corporate world viewed grid computing as a curiosity. Today, it views it as an opportunity--a chance to reduce costs, improve performance, fund new projects, and take advantage of under-utilized capacity. The engineering behind this transformation has been amply documented. Until now, however, little has been written to prepare managers, executives, and other decision-makers to implement grid computing in a sensible and effective way.

Grid Computing: The Savvy Manager's Guide examines the technology from a rigorous business perspective, equipping you with the practical knowledge you need to assess your options and determine what grid computing approach is right for your enterprise. This book is heavy on real-world experience, distilling from a rich assortment of case studies the best practices currently at work in a variety of industries. Always attentive to grid computings many competitive advantages, it is also realistic about the challenges of selling the idea to staff and making it a part of your companys culture.

Buy from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0127425039

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Grid Computing Book: IBM Redbooks - "Patterns: Emerging Patterns for Enterprise Grids"

2006-05-18T23:57:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

Title: Patterns: Emerging Patterns for Enterprise Grids
Authors: John Easton, David Kra, Michael Osias, Donald Pazel, Rob Vrablik, David Chisholm, Matthew Haynos, Luiz R. Rocha, Avi Saha, Ellen Stokes, Roberto Jimenez, Richard Appleby, Shweta Gupta, Joachim Dirker, Luis Ferreira, and Jean-Pierre Prost
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
ISBN: N/A
Book Description: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246682.html
Download Link: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/pdfs/sg246682.pdf
Abstract:

The target audience for this redbook are IT architects, consultants, software engineers with a need to use grid computing as a building block to the solution of architectural problems.

In their everyday work, those professionals need to evaluate a business problem and build a solution to solve it. They normally begin by gathering requirements related to the problem, designing a first outline of the solution and taking into consideration any special requirements that must be part of the final solution. After this step, they start the design of the actual solution, which can be comprised of one or more applications, each one requiring its own infrastructure in order to run.

Every time they can reuse the same set of solutions, devised from the experience they have acquired, the next engagement is simplified, reducing time and costs and increasing the levels of client satisfaction. Capturing, categorizing and providing access to the knowledge gained from each engagement into a repository of information can be beneficial to the overall professional community.

Patterns are great vehicles to capture components with a high degree of commonality among engagements and to express their interrelationships. Although most enterprise grid engagements are typically deployed with solutions that could be categorized as "one-of-a-kind", there is enough information gathered today to allow us to devise a set of common components among them and to derive enterprise grid patterns. The proposed patterns are based on grid solutions designed for enterprise clients over the past couple of years and are therefore representative of the current use of grid technologies in the enterprise today. They may not address all emerging grid technologies or be representative of research grids.

You can use this book as a helping guide for your grid solution design and we also expect that your experience and your feedback may be applied in the improvement of this work.

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Grid Computing Competition from Grid Computing Now!

2006-05-17T23:05:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

DTI Knowledge Transfer Network Grid Computing Now! and the British Computer Society have announced a competition for innovative solutions to challenges of the 21st century using the capabilities of grid computing technologies.

See the competition site for details.

The Competition in Outline
The competition is to develop a short description of an application of Grid Computing Technologies to solve a unique problem facing society in the 21st Century. Each submission should provide a short overview of the problem to be solved, an analysis and a description of the potential solution. We believe that the emergence of grid computing provides a new level of capability in high performance distributed computing and thus we would expect the problem addressed to be beyond today’s available solutions, such as cluster computing or other more constrained computing configurations. The competition will be judged by an appointed panel of experts from industry and the fields of science, the environment, engineering, design and arts. Prizes will be awarded for submissions that show the most originality, creativity, clear benefits and a feasible implementation. We expect to be able to offer individuals prizes ranging from computer equipment and software packages as well as an Internship or work placement at Intellect. We will also award membership to the BCS for prize winners. Entrants should be aware that there is a possibility that the competition will attract coverage in the media. The event will be launched early in the spring of 2006 with the aim of accumulating submissions during the summer with a preliminary short list available to be judged in the early autumn. A Competition Final event will be held for the short-listed entrants at which the prizes will be awarded.

Grid Computing Technologies
We are taking a broad view of Grid Computing to encourage a wide range of possible solutions. The key properties of Grid Computing in our view are the virtualising of resources to enable the provision of a more substantial and flexible computing capability to address a problem. There are two basic approaches to Grid Computing relevant in this context. Either a large scale distributed heterogeneous computer system which appears to the user as one large computer or a distributed application which enables the user to obtain a wide deployment of a very large task, broken down into small tasks, which are themselves, distributed across a volunteer computer network. This latter approach is becoming popular in use today, and would not be a particularly innovative approach to solving a problem. To assist entrants without the benefit of an extensive computing background we would recommend the definitions and descriptions offered by the CERN Grid Café. See http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/ for a primer and explanation.

Competition
There will be three stages to the competition; all submissions will be via the Grid Computing Now! Website www.gridcomputingnow.org , entrants intellectual property rights will be preserved:

* Firstly, an initial competition entry form will be used for submissions of up to 500 words describing the problem and their approach to a solution. The submissions will be reviewed by the organising committee and a selection made to be invited to submit a more complete entry.
* Secondly, those submitting successful proposals from stage 1 (between 30 and 50) will be invited to submit a short written paper, 1000 words, developing their idea further, supported by a short presentation. These submissions will be judged by the appointed panel.
* Thirdly, those proposals judged to be of most interest (a maximum of 10) will be invited to present their proposal in a Competition Final event scheduled for late September. Each competitor will be allocated 20 minutes comprising 10 minutes presentation and 10 minutes questions and answers. Prizes will be awarded on the basis of originality; creativity clear benefits and feasibility.

There will be three prizes awarded:

* 1st Prize: An X-Box 360 with the offer of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard 10 CALs and Microsoft Compute Cluster Server for the prize winner’s employer/university. The winner will also be eligible to attend the Microsoft European Technology Conference held in Brussels and be offered a year’s free membership of the British Computer Society. The winner will also be eligible for an Internship placement with Intellect, the Hi-tech trade association in Summer 2007.
* 2nd Prize: A laptop computer; Opportunity to utilise the eScience National Grid Service for a number of hours to implement a prototype solution. This will be supported by technical advice from the National eScience Centre and National Grid Service teams. A free membership of the British Computer Society for one year.
* 3rd Prize: Office software Microsoft Visual Studio.NET Professional and Microsoft Office Professional and a free membership of the British Computer Society for one year.

All prize winners will have their entries featured in communication materials, on the Grid Computing Now! website and if the opportunity arises, in the press.

Competition Launch Plans and Timeline:

* The Competition will be launched in the 2nd week of May. This will be via the GCN!, Intellect, BCS and NeSC websites and a press release.
* Initial Entries will be accepted until the end of June.
* These entries will be assessed in the first two weeks of July and an initial short-list created of between 30 and 50 entries.
* These entrants will be encouraged to submit by early September and a selection of up to 10 entrants will be invited to appear at the Competition Final event in central London in front of the judges on September 28th at the BCS offices in Southampton Street.

Contact:
competition@gridcomputingnow.org
Competition Website

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GGF launches Grid standards wiki

2006-05-17T00:04:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog.

From Grid Meter:

The SCRM working group within the GGF has launched a Wiki that attempts to corral the work done by the many different organizations that have their fingers in the cake of emerging grid computing standards.

SCRM stands for 'Standards Development Organization Collaboration on Networked Resources Management' which in and of itself is a mouthful. The Wiki is a collection of descriptions with links that leads the user to text on the actual standards and specifications.

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NMI Release 9 and OGCE Version 2.0 Released

2006-05-16T23:54:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

From Grid Today: NSF Releases NMI-R9,

Providing new event diagnostic, privilege management and portal-building tools, the ninth release of the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI-R9) makes further progress in addressing the challenge of collaborating online in a shared cyberinfrastructure environment. NMI-R9 is available to the public for downloading under open-source licenses at www.nsf-middleware.org.

New for this release is NMI-EDIT's End-to-END Diagnostic Discovery (EDDY) Toolkit that supports integrated analysis and diagnosis of distributed, layered and interdependent components and systems. "This release offers a critical step towards managing and troubleshooting the complex distributed environments that we're building to support science," said Ken Klingenstein, director of middleware and security at Internet2. "NMI-EDIT's EDDY Toolkit is a diagnostic model intended to encourage discussion and experimentation in this area."

OGCE Version 2.0 provides a complete toolkit for building science-portal gateways. Newly incorporated Sakai collaboration portlets provide access to their tools such as calendar scheduling, document sharing and chat functions. Also included are Grid portlet clients to the Globus Toolkit 4 services for credential acquisition, remote command execution, and remote file management. The release also features new portlets for Condor and the Storage Resource Broker and optional support for PURSe Grid account management. The OGCE portlet software and plugin modules are integrated with the GridSphere 2.1 portal container and include GridPort information and file management Web services, which may be deployed as separate "science gateway" services.

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Lessons learned from the TeraGrid

2006-05-14T19:18:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

IBM Developer Works is running a series on "Lessons learned from the TeraGrid". Up till now, two articles belonging to this series have been published:

Even though, the grid computing community is already aware of the TeraGrid, it is a NSF-funded project to provide integrated computational and data infrastructure for research scientists within the United States. The TeraGrid currently delivers more than 50 teraFLOPS of compute power and 600 TB of storage.

TeraGrid sites provide include IBM IA64 clusters, IBM and Dell IA32 clusters, all running Linux®, 32-processor and 8-processor IBM POWER4/AIX® clusters, an IBM Blue Gene®/L rack, a Cray XT3, and SPARC/Solaris nodes. Data resources include at least six IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) systems and an assortment of other parallel file systems, including file systems based on Parallel Virtual File System 2 (PVFS2), Lustre, Sun Microsystems' QFS, and IBRIX, along with several Mass Storage Systems (MSS) and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) systems.

The first article looks at the use of grid computing to enable large scale resource sharing throughout the TeraGrid transparently and easilly.

This article introduced the TeraGrid, currently the largest set of public high-end computational resources in the United States. It described the motivations behind the project and briefly introduced some of the challenges inherent in managing a large geographically distributed grid. A wide variety of strategies and tools is required to address these challenges, and this article provides an overview of some of the most significant ways in which the TeraGrid project has overcome these challenges.

The second article focuses on the two main data management approaches used in the TeraGrid. The two are GridFTP and the GPFS-WAN file system. GridFTP as we know is a set of extensions to the FTP protocol used to transfer files between the grid nodes. The GPFS-WAN file system, based on IBM's General Parallel File System, supports parallel file system within the Grid nodes. The various security and other flexible features of the system are of specific intrerest. As per the information in teh article the TeraGrid team was allocated 64 server nodes for file system and 6 server nodes for performing metadata operations.

It was the first time, I read about this, so let me quote a few sentences from the article.

two primary challenges must be overcome when providing a parallel file system on a grid: authentication and user-identity mapping; and providing a high level of performance under heavy load when potentially thousands of machines could be accessing the same file system simultaneously.

For GPFS-WAN, the TeraGrid team began by allocating a large number of disks to the file system (twice the amount available to any other high-performance file system), ensuring that the underlying storage would be more than sufficient to fill the available bandwidth.

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Call for Participation: GlobusWORLD 2006

2006-05-13T23:04:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

The GlobusWORLD Community Program at GridWorld. Join the Globus Software Community and GGF18 Participants at GridWorld 2006 at the Washington Convention Center.

Whether you're a Globus expert with technical advice to share, or an executive with visions for the future of open source enterprise Grid computing, GlobusWORLD is the premier event for delivering your message to the Grid community. In 2005 hundreds of Grid professionals from research and industry attended GlobusWORLD to discuss Grid adoption issues, receive training and exchange information related to Globus Software, the open-source solution for Grid Computing. This year we join forces with IDG World Expo and GGF to present the most comprehensive event on Grid computing to date.

The GlobusWORLD program will offer a wide variety of conference sessions, mini-symposiums, panel discussions, and tutorials. Speaking opportunities range from highly technical research, development, and deployment presentations to enterprise targeted panels on commercial Grid adoption considerations. The GlobusWORLD program will run in parallel with other GridWorld program tracks and every attempt will be made in scheduling to minimize unnecessary clashes.

Submissions may be wide ranging and should be centered on the theme of Globus Software in Grid Computing applications solutions and / or technology.

KEY DATES AND DEADLINES
Abstract submission deadline - May 26, 2006
Acceptance notification - June 2, 2006
Presentation Slides Due - September 1, 2006
GlobusWORLD Date - September 11-15, 2006

SPEAKING TOPICS

Submissions may be wide ranging and can include, but are not limited to the following
topics.

Technology:

Security
Resource / Service Management
Data Access and Integration
Service Oriented Architectures
Monitoring and Discovery
Provisioning / SLA
Meta-scheduling
Workflow
Web Services
Tools
Resource Virtualization

Solutions:

ROI / Time to Market
Data Intensive Applications
Compute Intensive Applications
Tele-Instrumentation Applications
Collaborative Applications
Other Applications
Utility Computing
Standards
Building Grid Services
Experiences
Testbeds

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

ABSTRACT GUIDELINES
All submissions must include an abstract of no more than 500 words. Abstracts should be written so as to be self-contained and to provide the technical substance required for the program committee to evaluate the session's contribution to the Globus(r) Software and Grid community. If the presentation was given at another conference, then the name, date, and location of the event must be noted in the submission. Abstracts should be submitted in plain text format either as an attachment or in the main body of the e-mail. Abstracts for accepted submissions will be published on the GlobusWORLD website and in other conference material as the description of the session. Presentation slides will be distributed with conference material.

INDIVIDUAL PRESENTATIONS
Presentation proposals may be submitted for individual time slots of thirty minutes, forty-five minutes, one hour or ninety minutes in length. Please be sure to allow ten minutes for Q&A within this allotted time. Individual presentations of less than ninety minutes will be grouped with similar topic presentations to fill an entire session. The submission must state both the preferred and acceptable durations of the presentation.

BUILD YOUR OWN SESSION
Participants are invited to organize their own, complete, ninety-minute session, including but not limited to the following categories. The submission must include an agenda, and the names and associations of all participants.

Panel Session / Mini-Symposium: These sessions will enable conference attendees to learn from a group of experts on a particular topic. The session organizer may deliver an opening talk to set the context for the remainder of the session. Panelists will then give presentations designed to stimulate audience participation, on their preferably diverse opinions, experiences or expertise regarding the theme of the session. At least ten minutes should be reserved at the end for questions from the audience.

Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) Sessions: These sessions will allow conference attendees to discuss focused subject areas. The session may include presentations and open discussion. Session organizers will be responsible for moderating these sessions and reporting on their outcomes.

All proposals and questions should be sent to gw-pc@globusworld.org

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Infinband primer

2006-05-12T19:02:00.001+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

A nice primer on Infinband appeared in Computer Technology Review. The author, Dave Ellis, is the director of HPC Architecture, Engenio Storage Group, LSI Logic Corporation.

InfiniBand is one of a few I/O architectures initially developed to address high bandwidth, low latency requirements for High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. While early HPC deployments may have used Ethernet interconnects, a certain amount of latency inherent to TCP/IP limited the overall potential performance of the clusters. Since the transport requirements for compute intensive applications do not need all the features of TCP/IP, development began on streamlined I/O architectures. The resulting solutions like Myrinet and InfiniBand support a Message Passing Interface (MPI) over high bandwidth (10 Gigabits per second, Gb/s), very low latency transport architectures.

InfiniBand is still a relatively new technology and today it is supported only in homogenous networks based on a Linux operating system. As the early adopters in HPC and data center environments continue to deploy it and reap the benefits of immensely increased speed and low latency, InfiniBand will eventually become more mainstream. It is expected to be adapted, in time, for use in more general purpose computing environments, and even has the potential to be a replacement for PCI bus architecture in high-end servers and PCs.

Link: http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1163&Itemid=44

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Infinband primer

2006-05-12T19:02:00.000+05:00

InfiniBand is one of a few I/O architectures initially developed to address high bandwidth, low latency requirements for High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. While early HPC deployments may have used Ethernet interconnects, a certain amount of latency inherent to TCP/IP limited the overall potential performance of the clusters. Since the transport requirements for compute intensive applications do not need all the features of TCP/IP, development began on streamlined I/O architectures. The resulting solutions like Myrinet and InfiniBand support a Message Passing Interface (MPI) over high bandwidth (10 Gigabits per second, Gb/s), very low latency transport architectures.

InfiniBand is still a relatively new technology and today it is supported only in homogenous networks based on a Linux operating system. As the early adopters in HPC and data center environments continue to deploy it and reap the benefits of immensely increased speed and low latency, InfiniBand will eventually become more mainstream. It is expected to be adapted, in time, for use in more general purpose computing environments, and even has the potential to be a replacement for PCI bus architecture in high-end servers and PCs.

Link: http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&amp;amp;id=1163&Itemid=44

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Grid Development Tools for Eclipse

2006-04-28T23:41:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

The Grid Development Tools (GDT) feature is a bundle of Eclipse Plugins useful for Service and Application Development in the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment. Apart from using GDT in the Eclipse Workbench interactively we support using Eclips headless, i.e. running the GDT tools as commandline tools, offering the possibility to including them in automated build scripts. The GDT supersedes development of the eclipse plugin and the old command line service generator.

Current version of GDT is 1.0.6. Download and find more information from:
http://ds.informatik.uni-marburg.de/MAGE/gdt/
http://www.eclipse-plugins.info/eclipse/plugin_details.jsp?id=1431

The GDT follows a model driven approach to service development. Developers can choose between different model sources such as annotated java classes or UML2 models of the application they intend to build. We have already defined an ECORE Meta Model for the upper layer platform specific model (UL-PSM) of a grid application. This upper layer model holds all grid specific information about an application (e.g. what services make up the application, what properties and methods are exposed by the services etc.). The meta model of the UL-PSM is an abstraction of grid computing platform, away from concrete target platform implementations such as Globus, MAGE or Unicore. Transformation from the UL-PSM to executable code on a target platform is defined by the Target Platform Mapping Model

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Grid Computing people wanted at LMKR

2006-04-28T23:37:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

LMKR Pakistan is looking for experienced professionals who've worked with grid
computing technologies with the following expertise:

. Application development using grid middleware
. Thorough understanding of distributed systems and their issues
. Development experience in java and C++
. Must have strong analytical skills

If you are interested, please apply at:
http://www.lmkr.com/careers
http://202.125.154.81/JobApplication.nsf/Information%20Technology?OpenForm

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Interesting News Story: Grid Computing Solution developed by Satyam Satyam Computer Services

2006-04-28T00:07:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

This morning, I read an interesting news story titled Satyam Computer develops Grid Computing Solution, courtesy Google News.

It mentions that Satyam Computer Services have developed a solution to support Cyber Forensic, but no details. Feel free to add your comments, if you happen to know anything about this.

Hyderabad, April 26 (PTI): Satyam Computer Services Limited has developed a Grid Computing Solution to be deployed at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Thiruvanthapuram.

The revolutionary technology will render support to the Resource Centre for Cyber Forensic (RCCF) at CDAC, B Ramani, Additional Director CDAC said in a release here today.

Ramani further said that this technology changed "our thinking about what can be achieved. With access to the kind of power the Grid provides, we can unshackle the constraints we were previously bound to and begin thinking of new and innovative ways to approach cyber-forensics".

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Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) Ratified as OASIS Standard

2006-04-25T00:45:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

According to Business Wire news story dated April 24, 2006, The OASIS international standards consortium today announced that its members have approved the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) version 1.2 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. WSRF provides a generic, open framework for modeling and accessing stateful resources using Web services. The WSRF OASIS Standard comprises a set of royalty-free, interoperable, and modular specifications that make it easier both to define and implement a Web service and to integrate and manage multiple services.A Web service is characterized by the messages that flow to and from it. Any resource manipulated by the service, such as a shopping cart at an online retail site, needs to be identified and described by the messages that are exchanged.

"WSRF solves the problem of how stateful resources can be represented and managed using Web service technologies," explained Ian Robinson of IBM, co-chair of the OASIS WSRF Technical Committee. "In particular, WSRF addresses the requirements of the Web Services for Distributed Management (WSDM) OASIS Standard and other industry standards to expose
and operate on fragments of a resource's state, which is essential in resource-constrained or low-bandwidth environments."

David Snelling of Fujitsu, co-chair of the OASIS WSRF Technical Committee, added, "The WSRF OASIS Standard provides a platform for many higher level WS Service applications including, but not limited to, management and Grid Computing infrastructures. Using WSRF, companies can provide a standardized, interoperable platform for resource-based Web services."

WSRF is already experiencing a high degree of acceptance in the marketplace, including the open source community. "We already have thousands of people coding to the Globus implementation of WSRF," said Dr. Ian Foster, director of the Computation Institute at Argonne
National Laboratory and University of Chicago, and a leader in the Globus Alliance, developers of the Globus open source implementation of WSRF. "The finalization of WSRF as an OASIS Standard will help accelerate adoption for interoperable distributed systems."

"The WSRF OASIS Standard was developed to help simplify Web Services and make them more flexible. Together, WSRF and Web Services Notification (WSN), which is also advanced at OASIS, are enabling a closer connection between the Grid services and Web services communities," noted Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "We congratulate the members of the OASIS WSRF Technical Committee-as well as those who participated in the
public review and who have already implemented WSRF--for all their work in advancing WSRF as an OASIS Standard."

The OASIS WSRF Technical Committee remains open to new participation. All interested parties are encouraged to exchange information on implementing WSRF via the wsrf-dev mailing list
(http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/). As with all Consortium projects, archives of the OASIS WSRF Technical Committee's work are accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS hosts an open mail list for public comment on the standard.

OASIS WSRF Technical Committee
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsrf/
WSRF Primer
http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsrf/wsrf-primer-1.2-primer-cd-01.pdf

See the Business Wire Story

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Cluster Interconnects: The Whole Shebang

2006-04-25T00:42:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

ClusterMonkey has a nice introductory article on Cluster Interconnects with a focus on interconnects that aren't tied to vendor specific node hardware.

An often asked question from both "clusters newbies" and experienced cluster users is, "what kind of interconnects are available?" The question is important for two reasons. First, the price of interconnects can range from as little as $32 per node to as much as $3,500 per node, yet the choice of an interconnect can have a huge impact on the performance of the codes and the scalability of the codes. And second, many users are not aware of all the possibilities. People new to clusters may not know of the interconnection options and, sometimes, experienced people choose an interconnect and become fixated on it, ignoring all of the alternatives. The interconnect is an important choice and ultimately the choice depends upon on your code, requirements, and budget.

Complete article: Cluster Interconnects: The Whole Shebang

The interconnects examined are:

Gigabit Ethernet
Gigabit Ethernet with Level 5 NICs
10 Gigabit Ethernet
Infiniband
Infinipath
Myrinet
QsNet (Quadrics)
SCI (Dolphin)

The article also examines various performance improvement methods and alternatives such as GAMMA, Scali MPI, etc. The review concludes with two tables summarizing key features and pricing for various size clusters.

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Grid Brokers and Metaschedulers Market Overview by GridwiseTech

2006-04-18T10:23:00.000+05:00

Cross-posted from The Grid Blog

GridwiseTech have an overview of the Grid brokers and metaschedulers currently available on the market. A good roundup for anyone looking for such solutions.

Executive Summary

The report has been written from a vendor-independent perspective. Following the policy of GridwiseTech, we offer fully unbiased evaluation of the researched metaschedulers. The report does not rate the discussed solutions against one another, and the order of their presentation is entirely unrelated to their respective quality.

We are pleased to offer commentary on the following solutions:

CSF and Platform CSF Plus
Grid Service Broker
GridWay
Moab Grid Scheduler (aka Silver)
EGEE Workload Manager Service (WMS)
Nimrod/G and Axceleon EnFuzion
MP Synergy
Condor-G

Download the report from: http://www.gridwisetech.com/component/option,com_docman
/task,cat_view/gid,20/Itemid,51/lang,en/
http://www.gridwisetech.com/content/view/110/88/lang,en/

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Final Call for Papers: 19th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems

2006-04-16T10:18:00.000+05:00

Crossposted from The Grid Blog

September 20-22, 2006, Hilton San Francisco, Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, California USA
Sponsored by the International Society for Computers and Their Applications (ISCA)

See the final Call for papers

Topics include, but not limited to, the following research areas:
1. Parallel Architectures and Systems
2. Parallel and Distributed Algorithms
3. Parallel and Distributed Systems Software
4. Parallel and Distributed Applications

Important Dates
Paper Submission Deadline: April 30, 2006
Notification of Acceptance: May 19, 2006
Registration and Camera-ready Manuscripts Due: June 9, 2006Submission Procedures:
A full paper (not to exceed 15 double-spaced pages), including title, author's name(s), affiliation, mailing address, telephone, fax and e-mail of the principal author should reach the Program Chair on or before April 30, 2006. Papers will be accepted only by electronic submission (PDF format only) to: gdp@utk.edu Please use 'PDCS-2006 Submission' in the subject line of your email. The submitted manuscript should closely reflect the final paper as it will appear in the Proceedings, which will be a maximum of 6 pages (+2 pages with additional page charges) in ISCA double-column format. See: http://www.isca-hq.org/sample-isca-manuscript-format.pdf

Filed Under:

The Grid Blog: Call for Particiation CCGrid 2006

2006-04-11T23:28:00.000+05:00

This Blog has merged with The Grid Blog. Articles will be cross posted to this blog till the end of this month. Please update your bookmarks / feed urls.

The Grid Blog: Call for Particiation CCGrid 2006

6th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid
CCGrid 2006
16-19 May 2006
SMU Campus, Singapore

CCGrid 2006 (http://pdcc.ntu.edu.sg/ccgrid2006) will be held jointly with GridAsia 2006

Scope
CCGrid 2006 is the sixth in a series of successful international conferences and for the first time will take place in the heart of South-East Asia - Singapore. The conference will be held at Singapore Management University in the centre of Singapore. The past years have seen tremendous challenges with the convergence of Web Services and Grid Technology. There have been major initiatives - internationally as well as locally - within the community that has taken up these challenges. Grid Technology enables us tmake a major change in the paradigm for conducting our work with the holy grail of "computing on tap", which in particular includes collaborative sharing. With this in mind CCGrid 2006 provides researchers and practitioners with an excellent opportunity tshare their research and experience at the cross-roads of Grid Technology. The areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
Web Services Flow Languages

Programming Models, Tools & Environments

Peer-to-Peer computing

Information Services

Resource Exchange Architectures

Grid-based Problem Solving Environments

Scientific, Engineering and Commercial Grid Applications

Middleware for Clusters and Grids

Parallel File Systems & Wide Area File Systems

Scheduling and Load Balancing

Performance Evaluation and Modelling

Resource Management and Scheduling

Computational Data and Information Grid

Architectures and Systems

Grid Economies and Service Architectures

Programme
CCGrid2006 will be held in conjunction with GridAsia2006 in Singapore Management University (SMU) Campus (http://www.ngp.org.sg/gridasia/2006/venue.html).

The conference will contain:

4 Keynote Talks - Over 90 papers in the main conference (25% acceptance rate for regular papers)

7 Workshops

5 Tutorials

Exhibition

Registration Dates
Advanced Registration: 15 April 2006 (Registration Site)
Accomodation

Special rates have been arranged for GridAsia2006/CCGrid2006 delegates for the following hotels: Grand Plaza Parkroyal, Rendzvous Hotel Singapore, and Carlton Hotel Singapore. http://pdcc.ntu.edu.sg/ccgrid2006/conf.htm

Filed Under:

The Grid Blog: The Emergence of Grid and Service-Oriented IT: An Industry Vision for Business Success

2006-04-09T19:28:00.000+05:00

This Blog has merged with The Grid Blog. Articles will be cross posted to this blog till the end of this month. Please update your bookmarks / feed urls.

The Grid Blog: The Emergence of Grid and Service-Oriented IT: An Industry Vision for Business Success

Title: The Emergence of Grid and Service-Oriented IT: An Industry Vision for Business Success
Authors / Editors: No Information Avaiable
Publisher: Tabor Communications Inc.
Buy from Amazon: Not Avaiable
Also avaiable at: http://www.taborcommunications.com/publications/
Review: Book is not avaiable at the moment, so the review provided by the Publisher is given below:
"The unprecedented globalization of modern business demands the virtualization of IT. Organizations worldwide are racing to embrace the enterprise of the future, and the emergence of Grid and SOA are key to realizing this vision and accomplishing the virtualization of IT in an efficient and effective manner. This book is about the vision, the challenges, the lessons learned, and the future. This book is a guide for those architecting the next generation of enterprise IT." - Wolfgang Gentzsch, Coordinator, D-Grid
Sample Chapter: Not Avaiable
Comments: Intel was the main sponsor of the book while the book was first anounce in November last year when call for participation was launched. The publisher's site also says that the collaborators and sponsors of the publication include premier sponsor Intel Corporation; premier analyst sponsor The 451 Group; platinum sponsors BEA Systems, Capgemini, Dell, IBM, SAP, SUN Microsystems; gold sponsors DataSynapse, HP and Platform Computing; and silver sponsors Gemstone Systems and Penguin Computing.

Filed Under:

The Grid Blog: Intel, Red Hat Hook Up For Virtualization, Grid Computing

2006-04-06T15:04:00.000+05:00

This Blog has merged with The Grid Blog. Articles will be cross posted to this blog till the end of this month. Please update your bookmarks / feed urls.

The Grid Blog: Intel, Red Hat Hook Up For Virtualization, Grid Computing

Information week reported in a news article that Red Hat and Intel have launched a global program to accelerate virtualization and enterprise-grid computing.

Read the complete story.

Filed Under:

The Grid Blog: 2006 Summer Grid Workshop

2006-04-06T14:56:00.000+05:00

This Blog has merged with The Grid Blog. Articles will be cross posted to this blog till the end of this month. Please update your bookmarks / feed urls.

The Grid Blog: 2006 Summer Grid Workshop

The Summer Grid Workshop, a unique opportunity for graduate and advanced undergraduate students to learn about distributed computing and its application in scientific data analysis, is now accepting applications. The deadline is April 23 to apply for the 2006 session, which will be held June 26-30 on South Padre Island, Texas.

For more information visit the Grid Summer Workshop 2006 website.

The aim of the program will be to give students a basic foundation in distributed computing, and valuable hands-on training in computing techniques. The workshop introduces essential skills that will be needed by students in the natural and applied sciences, engineering, and computer science to conduct and support scientific analysis in the emerging grid computing environment.

The school's Scientific Organizing Committee consists of scientists from GriPhyn, iVDGL, the Grid Center, NCSA, and UTB/TSC. Workshop participants will work with some of the world's leading experts in grid computing, through a blend of lectures, discussions, and hands-on computing exercises completed on large-scale grid hardware and software resources.

Filed Under:

Merger with Grid Blog

2006-04-05T16:59:00.000+05:00

I am merging my blog with The Grid Blog of Ahmar Abbas. From now onwards, I will be posting to the grid blog. The archives will remain here for your reference and I will cross-post entries here for about a month.

Hope you people enjoy the collaborative effort and better interface.

URL: http://www.gridblog.com/
RSS Feed: http://www.gridblog.com/index.xml

Filed Under:

Grid-Computing

April '06 issue of Globus Consortium Journal is here

2006-03-30T22:51:00.000+05:00

This month's Globus Consortium Journal is here. It focuses on The Linux / Grid Relationship.

I have not read all the articles, but after going through them, I found Operating System Performance Demands of Grid by Adam Fineberg to be most impressive - a must read. Will try to write my thought on the remaining later.

You can find it here:
http://www.globusconsortium.org/journal/20060330/

The articles include the following:

Filed Under:

Linux

Call for Papers: GridNets 2006

2006-03-30T18:28:00.000+05:00

Call for Papers
===============

GridNets 2006
Third International Workshop on Networks for Grid Applications
Co-Sponsored by IEEE Communications Society and Create-Net

Co-located with IEEE Communications Society/Create-Net Broadnets 2006
San Jose, California, USA, October 1-2, 2006

http://www.gridnets.org

Grid developers and practicioners are increasingly realising the
importance of an efficient network support. Entire classes of
applications would greatly benefit by a network-aware Grid middleware,
able to effectively manage the network resource in terms of scheduling,
access and use. Conversely, the peculiar requirements of Grid
applications provide stimulating drivers for new challenging research
towards the development of Grid-aware networks.

Cooperation between Grid middleware and network infrastructure driven by
a common control plane is a key factor to effectively empower the global
Grid platform for the execution of network-intensive applications,
requiring massive data transfers, very fast and low-latency connections,
and stable and guaranteed transmission rates. Big e-science projects, as
well as industrial and engineering applications for data analysis, image
processing, multimedia, or visualisation just to name a few are awaiting
an efficient Grid network support. They would be boosted by a global
Grid platform enabling end-to-end dynamic bandwidth allocation,
broadband and low-latency access, interdomain access control, and other
network performance monitoring capabilities.

The Gridnets 2006 workshop will provide a focused and highly interactive
forum where researchers and technologists will have the opportunity to
present and discuss leading research, developments, and future
directions in the Grid networking area.

As an IEEE publication, the proceedings will also be accessible through
the IEEE Xplore website and other digital libraries. Best papers will be
considered for publication in a special section of Elsevier Future
Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) - The International Journal of Grid
Computing: Theory, Methods and Application".

Scope
------

The GridNets 2006 workshop will focus on research issues and challenges
as well as lessons learned from experience. Topics of interest include
and are not limited to:

* New concepts and requirements to shape the design of eScience and
Research Networks
* Integration of advanced optical networking technologies and
architectures (OPS, OBS) for the Grid environment
* Coordination of network resources with other Grid resources (CPU,
Storage)
* Layer interactions: optical layer with higher layer protocols
* Grid advanced resource reservation
* Self-healing Grid networks
* Traffic characteristics and performance analysis
* New architectures and technologies that address Grid requirements
* Experience on production-level optical network infrastructures
* Middleware design and grid layer integration issues for accessing
and managing network resources
* Routing and scheduling for dynamic bandwidth control
* Monitoring, provisioning, brokering of network resources
* New multi-service frameworks and models
* End-to-end application level control of network resource
* Peer-to-peer approach for Grid networks
* Network support for wireless Grids
* Novel data transport protocols designed for new application services
* Data replication and multicasting strategies and protocols
* Fault-tolerance, protection, security, and scalability issues
related to connecting large number of sites
* Network cost, performance, and incentive issues
* Grid network simulation
* Identification of Grid peculiarities that network mechanisms can
build upon

Important Dates
-----------------

Paper Submission Deadline: May 26, 2006
Paper Acceptance Notification: June 30, 2006
Final paper submission: July 31, 2006

(For submission instructions, refer to http://www.gridnets.org )

Organizing Committee
====================

Workshop co-chairs: Pascale Vicat-Blanc Primet (ENS Lyon), Michael Welzl
(University of Innsbruck)
Workshop vice-chair: Piero Spinnato (Create-Net)
Technical Program Committee chairs: Wayne Clark (Cisco), Yufeng Xin (MCNC)
Panel chair: Bela Berde (Alcatel)
Publicity chair: Antoine Pichot (Europe) (Alcatel), Tomohiro Kudoh
(Asia) (AIST), Brian Tierny (USA) (LBL)
Steering Committee: Imrich Chlamtac (Create-Net), Gigi Karmous-Edwards
(MCNC), Michael Welzl (University of Innsbruck)
Conference coordination and registration: Kitti H. Kovacs (ICST)

Program Committee
=================

Bill Allcock - Argonne National Lab
Lina Battestilli - MCNC
Micah Beck - University of Tennessee
Augusto Casaca - INESC
Piero Castoldi - Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
Cees De Laat - Universiteit van Amsterdam
Peter Dinda - Northwestern University
Jose Fernandes - FCCN
Tiziana Ferrari - INFN - CNAF
Gabriele Garzoglio - Fermi National Lab
Wolfgang Gentzsch - D-Grid
Wolfgang Gerteis - SAP Belfast
Doan Hoang - University of Technology, Sydney
David Hutchison - Lancaster University
Adriana Iamnitchi - University of South Florida
Admela Jukan - Universite de Quebec
Jussi Kangasharju - Technical University Darmstadt
Gigi Karmous-Edwards - MCNC
Dieter Kranzlmüller - University of Linz
Joe Mambretti - Northwestern Univ
Max Mühlhäuser - Technical University Darmstadt
Nicholas Race - Lancaster University
Matei Ripeanu - University of British Columbia
Volker Sander - University of Applied Sciences Aachen
Dimitra Simeonidou - University of Essex
Oliver Yu - University of Illinois at Chicago
Yufeng Xin -MCNC

Filed Under:

Grid Computing Book: Globus Toolkit 4: Programming Java Services

2006-03-30T14:24:00.000+05:00

Title: Globus Toolkit 4: Programming Java Services
Authors: Borja Sotomayor and Lisa Childers
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers / Elsevier
Buy from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0123694043
Review: By Greg Nawrocki (Complete review avaiable at: http://weblog.infoworld.com/gridmeter/archives/2006/03/recommended_rea.html)

The very first part on key concepts and the first chapter in the GT4 security section are amongst the best and most concise explanations of those topics I have ever read, and believe me, I've read plenty. The explanations on key concepts of grid computing, OGSA, WSRF and Web Services may indeed be just the medicine the confused Grid masses need to make the light bulb go on it their heads.

If you buy this book for nothing more than the first 39 pages, and the first 12 pages of the GT4 Security section, you will walk away happy.

Sample Chapter: http://books.elsevier.com/bookscat/samples/0123694043/Sample_Chapters/01~frontmatter.pdf

Filed Under:

Web Services specifications for resources, events, and management backed by HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft

2006-03-18T23:25:00.000+05:00

HP, IBM, Intel & Microsoft have anounced on March 15, 2006, a roadmap titled: "Toward Converging Web Service Standards for Resources, Events, and Management". A very welcome step and hailed greatly by the Grid and Web Service community. The only big company missing from the scene is Sun - lets wait and see what stand they take on this as I assuem they were backing IBM on WSRF and related specs.

The efforts according to the roadmap, involves converging various overlapping specifications available for the similar purposes. e.g., every grid developer, architect is familiar with WSRF (Web Service Resource Framework) and WS-N (Web Service Notification); as these are the basis of the latest version Globus Toolkit (GT4), but there exists another competing set of specifications such as WS-Management, that the microsoft platform developers have to deal with.

Ian Foster, the grid guru and architect of various grid and web service related specifications has the following to say in his commentary:

The published roadmap suggests that the new specifications that are to be developed will include essentially all of the core concepts introduced back in 2001 in the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) [5] and subsequently incorporated in WSRF/WS-N [6]. So this initiative is good news: it promises to deliver what the Grid and Globus communities have been working towards for close to 5 years: industry-wide standards for Web Services-based systems management.

The strong commitment stated by HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft to the concepts, mechanisms, and interfaces encoded in WSDM/WSRF/WS-N and WS-Man/WS-Transfer/WS-Eventing should provide developers and users with considerable confidence that this technology is here for the long haul.

I have not read the complete roadmap and will post back with more details once I am done with the piled up work. By that time, following are some relevant quotes from the roadmap.

The result [of the effort] will eventually provide an industry-wide set of standards for resources access and eventing that will be useful for many scenarios in management integration, manageability, and grid computing,

On a related note, I just read a news item that OASIS has approved WS-Security 1.1

More later ...

Links:
Roadmap specifications
Dedicated IBM Web page
Dedicated HP Webpage
Ian Foster's commentary on the roadmap
OASIS stamps approval on WS-Security 1.1

Filed Under:

GRID 2006: Preliminary Call for Papers

2006-02-24T12:03:00.000+05:00

GRID 2006 Preliminar Call for Papers
====================================

GRID 2006 the 7th IEEE International Conference on Grid Computing
Barcelona, 28-29 September
www.grid2006.org

The Grid conference series is an anual international meeting that brings together a community of researchers, developers, practitioners, and users involved with Grid technology. The objective of the meeting is to serve as both the premier conference presenting best Grid research and a forum where new concepts can be introduced and explored.

The previous events in this series were: Grid 2000, Bangalore, India; Grid 2001, Denver; Grid 2002, Baltimore; Grid 2003, Phoenix; Grid 2004, Pittsburgh; and the sixth event, Grid 2005 in Seattle. All of these events have been successful in attracting high quality papers and a wide international participation. Last year's event attracted about 400 registered participants.

From the second event through the sixth, we have been known as the Grid Workshop affiliated with the Supercomputing SC conference series. For this, our seventh event, we will convene our first meeting as a conference and this year we will be co-located with the 2006 Cluster conference.

The proceedings of the first three workshops were published by
Springer-Verlag, and the proceedings of the three most recent workshops were published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. We expect this year's proceedings will join those of the last three years in the IEEE Computer Society's Digital Library.

Grid 2006 has been labeled CoreGRID event.

SCOPE
=====

Grid 2006 topics of interest (in no particular order) include, but are not limited to:

* Internet-based Computing Models
* Applications, including eScience and eBusiness Applications
* Distributed and Large-Scale Data Access and Management
* Middleware and Toolkits
* Monitoring, Management and Organization Tools
* Resource Management and Scheduling
* Networking
* Virtual Instrumentation
* Metadata, Ontologies, and Provenance
* Creation and Management of Virtual Enterprises and Organizations
* Architectures and Fabrics
* Information Services
* Security Issues
* Programming Models, Tools, and Environments
* Grid Economy
* Autonomic and Utility Computing on Global Grids
* Performance Evaluation and Modeling
* Cluster and Grid Integration Issues
* Scientific, Industrial and Social Implications

Technical Papers
================

Grid 2006 invites authors to submit original and unpublished work (also not submitted elsewhere for review) reporting solid and innovative results in any aspect of grid computing and its applications. Papers should not exceed 8 single-spaced pages of text using 10-point size type on 8.5 x 11 inch paper (see IEEE author instructions, a LaTeX style sheet and Word format is available, too). All bibliographical references, tables, and figures must be included in these 8 pages. Submissions that exceed the 8-page limit will not
be reviewed. Authors should submit a PDF file that will print on a PostScript printer.

Submission implies the willingness of at least one of the authors to register and present the paper.

Proceedings: All papers selected for this conference are peer-reviewed and will be published as a separate proceedings. After the event, the papers will also be published in the IEEE Xplore and the CS digital library. For author instructions see http://www.computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm

Special Issue: The best 6 to 8 papers from the conference will be selected for journal length extension and their publication in a special issue of the Future Generation Computing Systems (FGCS).

Important Dates
===============

1 March 2006 Paper submission site open
7 April 2006 Full paper submission due
14 April 2006 Last date for paper updates before review process
9 June 2006 Acceptance notification
1 July 2006 Camera-ready copy due
28-29 Sept 2006 Conference

Conference Organization
=======================

General co-Chairs

Andrew Grimshaw, University of Virginia, USA
Rosa M. Badia, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain

Program Chair

Dennis Gannon, Indiana University, USA

Program Vice Chairs

Applications: Satoshi Matsuoka, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Data Management: Beth Plale, Indiana University, USA
Networking/Security/Infrastructure: Olle Mulmo, Center for Parallel Computers, KTH Sweeden
Scheduling/Resource management: Jarek Nabrzyski, Poznan Supercomputing
Center, Poland
Tools/Software/Middleware: Ian Taylor, Cardiff University, UK

Publicity Chair: Julita Corbalan, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain

Proceedings Chair: Rajkumar Buyya, University of Melbourne, Australia

Finance Chair: Craig Lee, The Aerospace Corporation, USA

Local arrangements chair: Toni Cortes, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain

Tutorial Chair: Salim Hariri, University of Arizona, USA

Steering Committee
==================

Chair: Craig Lee, Aerospace Corp., USA

Mark Baker, University of Portsmouth, UK
Rajkumar Buyya, University of Melbourne, Australia
Wolfgang Gentzsch, D-Grid, Germany
Daniel S. Katz, JPL/Caltech, USA
Manish Parashar, Rutgers University, USA
Heinz Stockinger, University of Vienna, Austria

Filed Under:

Grid Computing Book: Grid Computing for Developers

2006-02-23T12:25:00.000+05:00

Title: Grid Computing for Developers
Author: Vladimir Silva
Publisher: Charles River Media
Sample Chapter:
http://webtools.delmarlearning.com/sample_chapters/1584504242_ch1.pdf
Review: Taken from Globus Consortium Journal

For enterprise software engineers that want to cut their teeth on Grid computing development, a new release by Charles River Media, Inc. "Grid Computing for Developers" might be worth taking a look at.
Author Vladimir Silva is a former IBM software engineer with deep technical experience with the IBM Grid Toolbox and the Globus Toolkit. His book drills beyond conceptual Grid architecture discussions -- and provides a companion's guide (with code samples) for common Grid installation, security set-up and integration scenarios.
Silva notes that the enterprise is still in the early exploration days in terms of Grid-enabling core business applications -- but "Grid Computing for Developers" does provide some specific technical drill-downs on Grid services running in more 'mainstream' commercial types of environments. For example, in the "Security" section (Chapter 8), Silva describes how a certificate authority works with a Web-based application "along with command-line tools and installation transcripts for two popular application servers: Apache Tomcat and IBM WebSphere."
While the book went to publication prior to the release of GT4 (and therefore emphasizes best development practices around GT3), 'Grid Development for Developers' stands out as one of the first Grid publications that gives the enterprise developer a technical point of reference as they actually role up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with some of the core open source Grid plumbing in common use today in research and science Grids.
See actual review at: http://www.globusconsortium.org/journal/20060208/gridCompForDev.html

Buy from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584504242

Filed Under:

Call for papers - EURO-PAR 2006

2006-01-25T11:04:00.000+05:00

CALL FOR PAPERS
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 31, 2006

EURO-PAR 2006
August 29 - September 1, 2006
Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany

Web site: http://www.europar2006.de/
Email: euro...@zih.tu-dresden.de
********************************************************************

MISSION STATEMENT - EURO-PAR

Euro-Par is an annual series of international conferences dedicated to
the promotion and advancement of parallel computing. The major themes
can be
divided into the broad categories of hardware, software, algorithms, and
applications for parallel computing. The objective of Euro-Par is to
provide a
forum within which to promote the development of parallel computing as an
industrial technique and as an academic discipline, extending the
frontier of
both the state of the art and the state of the practice.
Besides, the planned Grid Village provides an opportunity to showcase
the latest developments in Grid technology with demonstrations and hands
on experiences.

SCIENTIFIC PROGRAM AND WORKSHOPS
The following topics will be covered by regular Euro-Par 2006 sessions:

1. Support Tools and Environments
2. Performance Prediction and Evaluation
3. Scheduling and Load Balancing
4. Compilers for High Performance
5. Parallel and Distributed Databases, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
6. Grid and Cluster Computing: Models, Middleware and Architectures
7. Parallel Computer Architecture and Instruction Level Parallelism
8. Distributed Systems and Algorithms
9. Parallel Programming: Models, Methods, and Languages
10. Parallel Numerical Algorithms
11. Distributed and High-Performance Multimedia
12. Theory and Algorithms for Parallel Computation
13. Routing and Communication in Interconnection Networks
14. Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
15. Peer-to-Peer and Web Computing
16. Applications of High-Performance and Grid Computing
17. High-Performance Bioinformatics
18. Embedded Parallel Systems

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
SUBMISSION

Papers are invited to be submitted for the Euro-Par 2006 conference.
Papers must be committed to one of the specific topics listed. Authors
may specify a secondary topic, if applicable. Details on topics,
including descriptions and chairs, are available on the conference
website. Original contributions regarding the theory and practice of
parallel and distributed computing not submitted for publication
elsewhere will be considered.

Paper submission must be performed electronically via the conference
website
http://www.europar2006.de/index.php?page=1

As indicated there, papers must not exceed 10 pages in the LNCS style.
Accepted paper formats are PDF and Postscript. All accepted papers will
be included in the conference proceedings, which will be published by
Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

Online submission will be open before the end of December 2005.

ADDITIONAL CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
In addition to extending the list of topics for regular sessions,
Euro-Par 2006 will be the first conference in this series featuring
workshops running in parallel with the conference's main sessions.
Proposals for workshops covering a specific theme and lasting between
half a day and two days are encouraged and solicited until the end of
December 2005.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
KEY DATES

December 31, 2005: Workshop proposals due
January 31, 2006: Full papers due
May 2, 2006: Notification of acceptance
May 30, 2006: Camera-ready papers and author registration due

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel (a)
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang V. Walter (b)
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Lehner (c)

(a) Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH),
and Dept. of Computer Science, Inst. of Computer Engineering, TU
Dresden
(b) Dept. of Mathematics, Inst. of Scientific Computing, TU Dresden
(c) Dept. of Computer Science, Inst. of System Architecture, TU Dresden

----------------------------------------------------------------------
VENUE

Technische Universitaet Dresden is one of the oldest technical
universities in Germany and has a long tradition of designing and
building measuring instruments, mechanical calculators, and pioneering
computers. Currently, it is installing one of the largest high
performance computing facilities for data intensive computing in Germany.

The city of Dresden will celebrate its 800th anniversary in 2006.
Furthermore, Dresden has been elected "City of Science" in Germany for
the year 2006.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Euro-Par 2006 - Organization
Dresden University of Technology
Center for Information Services
and High Performance Computing (ZIH)
D-01062 Dresden
Germany
Phone: (+49) 351/463-35450
Fax: (+49) 351/463-37773
e-mail: t...@europar2006.de

Filed Under:

Grid's Top Six in 2006 by Greg Nawrocki

2006-01-20T23:04:00.000+05:00

Greg Nawrocki wrote an article titled Grid's Top Six in 2006 in Grid Today lists down top 6 rid areas and some 6 interesting vendors to watch out for in the coming year. The vendors are the same as the author wrote in his earlier blog.

The top 6 areas include:

Data Virtualization and Grid Computing Directions
Securing the Grid
Network Intelligence Increasing the Grid's IQ
The Linux/Grid Relationship
Grid Licensing Issues
Virtual Workspaces

And the 6 interesting vendors include:

Platform Computing
Univa Corp.
EMC Corp.
Cisco Systems
Network Appliance
Microsoft Corp.

See complete story at:
http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mid=540387&xsl=story.xsl

Filed Under:

CBR-Oracle Grid Survey

2006-01-19T01:00:00.000+05:00

According to CBR's latest survey into attitudes towards grid computing, understanding of the concepts and technologies is growing, while the problems that grid computing can help solve are getting worse. The survey of IT decision makers also says that the problems associated with maintaining enterprise applications infrastructure have got worse in the last two years.

The survey is concluded with the following noteworthy remarks:

CBR's latest grid survey indicates that knowledge of grid computing has increased by a significant margin in the last two years. That knowledge is slowly being turned into increased understanding of concepts and technologies and then into pilot projects and live implementations. With good levels of interest and adoption for some of the underlying technologies, it appears that grid computing is on the cusp of a new level of deployment. For many users the advantages of grid computing cannot come too soon. As the pain points associated with managing, upgrading and supporting enterprise applications continue to rise, and utilisation rates remain low, many more businesses are likely to follow up their growing understanding of grid computing to investigate the potential business benefits.

The complete report is avaiable at:
http://www.cbronline.com/oracle4.asp

Filed Under:

Digipede Network and Digipede framework SDK review

2006-01-18T18:33:00.000+05:00

Digipede Technologies has received a 4-star rating from Software Development magazine for its Digipede Network™, an affordable distributed computing solution built entirely on Microsoft .NET.

The review concludes:

Overall, I was quite impressed with both the Network product and the Framework SDK. If you have a bunch of Windows boxes sitting on desktops or feel like ordering a pallet-load or two from some discount vendor, I can’t think of an easier way to set up cost-effective compute farms. I did find the Workbench application somewhat confusing at first; nontechnical users would likely squeal “Argh!” when confronted with their first job template, but persistence and a bit of delving in the docs will either get them up to speed or let you create a cheat-sheet for them. And the documentation is quite clear and reasonably complete; the Framework SDK material is especially good.

In my admittedly small-scale testing, I often saw near-linear speedups when submitting jobs to the Network. Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re squirting gigabytes of data back and forth.

However, as I seem to say in just about every review, this isn’t magic fairy dust. You may have noticed me waving my hands rapidly over the Worker class (“computation happens here”), but none of this infrastructure attacks the hard problem of parallelizing your algorithms in the first place. Rather, think of this as a way to make the management and deployment of the programs you do eventually develop as painless as possible—at least until we get those quantum computers.

Actual article at:
http://www.acumeninfo.com/eprints/6338digipede.html?clientId=erights

Press release by Digipede:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/1/prweb330903.htm

Filed Under:

Analysts See Big Year for Grid

2006-01-18T00:14:00.000+05:00

In a grid computing planet article, Paul Shread quotes a report by 451 group that 2006 is going to be an important year for grid computing.

The report predicts that grids will be deployed in enterprises and Emerging Open Standards, Open Source Stacks and GGF-EGA merger will be helpful.

See cmplete story at:
http://www.gridcomputingplanet.com/news/article.php/3577831

Filed Under:

E-Science 2005 Conference Report

2006-01-16T16:20:00.000+05:00

Some days earlier, I have got the following conference report on a grid computing mailing list which I found worth sharing with everyone.

Slides of keynote and tutorials presentations can be downloaded from:
http://www.gridbus.org/escience/escience2005/escience2005schedule.html

The conference proceedings is published by the IEEE CS Press and it should
appears in their Digital Library and IEEE Xplore soon.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Science 2005 Conference Report
By Ron Perrott and Rajkumar Buyya, e-Science 2005 co-chairs
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The first International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science 2005) was held December 5-8, 2005 at the Langham Hotel in Melbourne, Australia. The conference provided a forum for all e-science and grid researchers, developers and users to discuss and discover recent
progress in e-science.

This first in a series of e-Science conferences was held jointly with the second International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP 2005). The combined conferences attracted more than 350 participants from more than 30 countries. The e-Science conference alone received over 175 contributions from Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas.

"The interest the conference generated worldwide was impressive, as was the high quality of the papers submitted from the international community," said conference organizer Ron Perrott. "The keynote speakers really set the scene by presenting vision, opportunity and progress in the e-science area. The breadth and depth of the conference presentations emphasised the widespread developments taking place in grid computing and e-science."

The e-Science 2005 conference was sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee for Scalable Computing and organized by the University of Melbourne in cooperation with various research organizations. Financial support was received from the State of Victoria, AMD, Intel, Alexander Technologies, Dell, EMC, WASP, MMSN and NICTA.

The conference program included keynote speeches, peer-reviewed research paper presentations, workshops, an industry track, tutorials and a poster session. Mark Sargent, Chairman of the Australian National e-Research Coordination Committee, kicked off the conference. Keynote speakers included Ian Foster, one of the creators of the grid, from Argonne National Laboratory in the U.S., Carole Goble of the e-Science North West Centre at The University of Manchester in the UK, and Professor Hideo Matsuda from the Department of Bioinformatic Engineering at Osaka University in Japan. The keynote addresses set the tone of
the conference and provided the delegates with a great insight into service-oriented architectures, data integration and Web semantics.

The conference hosted three workshops: Innovative and Collaborative Problem Solving Environment in Distributed Resources; Deploying Production Grids—Beyond the Hype; and Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid. Tutorials on three different middleware implementations were also offered: the Gridbus Toolkit, delivered by researchers from the GRIDS Lab, University of Melbourne; the Globus Toolkit delivered by Ian Foster; and Nimrod-G, from researchers at Monash University in Australia.

Presentation slides of some of these tutorials are available for download from the conference Web site: The first International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science 2005) was held December 5-8, 2005 at the Langham Hotel in Melbourne, Australia. The conference provided a forum for all e-science and grid researchers, developers and users to discuss and discover recent progress in e-science.

This first in a series of e-Science conferences was held jointly with the second International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP 2005). The combined conferences attracted more than 350 participants from more than 30 countries. The e-Science conference alone received over 175 contributions from Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas.

"The interest the conference generated worldwide was impressive, as was the high quality of the papers submitted from the international community," said conference organizer Ron Perrott. "The keynote speakers really set the scene by presenting vision, opportunity and progress in the e-science area. The breadth and depth of the conference presentations emphasised the widespread developments taking place in grid computing and e-science."

The e-Science 2005 conference was sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee for Scalable Computing and organized by the University of Melbourne in cooperation with various research organizations. Financial support was received from the State of Victoria, AMD, Intel, Alexander Technologies, Dell, EMC, WASP, MMSN and NICTA.

The conference program included keynote speeches, peer-reviewed research paper presentations, workshops, an industry track, tutorials and a poster session. Mark Sargent, Chairman of the Australian National e-Research Coordination Committee, kicked off the conference. Keynote speakers included Ian Foster, one of the creators of the grid, from Argonne National Laboratory in the U.S., Carole Goble of the e-Science North West Centre at The University of Manchester in the UK, and Professor Hideo Matsuda from the Department of Bioinformatic Engineering at Osaka University in Japan. The keynote addresses set the tone of
the conference and provided the delegates with a great insight into service-oriented architectures, data integration and Web semantics.

The conference hosted three workshops: Innovative and Collaborative Problem Solving Environment in Distributed Resources; Deploying Production Grids—Beyond the Hype; and Scientific Instruments and Sensors on the Grid. Tutorials on three different middleware implementations were also offered: the Gridbus Toolkit, delivered by researchers from the GRIDS Lab, University of Melbourne; the Globus Toolkit delivered by Ian Foster; and Nimrod-G, from researchers at Monash University in Australia.

Presentation slides of some of these tutorials are available for download from the conference Web site. More details about e-Science 2006, which will take place December 4-6 in Amsterdam, can be found at:
http://www.gridbus.org/escience/escience2005/

More details about e-Science 2006, which will take place December 4-6 in
Amsterdam, can be found at: http://www.gridbus.org/escience/.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Filed Under:

Microsoft and Grid Computing

2006-01-16T00:54:00.000+05:00

According to various people in the industry, microsoft is set to make an entry into grid computing. This will be sometime in the second quarter when the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 ships.

MS has already been seen partnering with Platform Computing and accolades to Digipede. We might as well see MS taking over some grid computing companies :)

While we are on the subject, below is a quote from a grid meter article:
Many questions still remain, and admittedly the above are a fairly disjoint collection of observations with no real central theme. So how does this warrant a position on a 2006 watch list? Five hundred pound gorilla jokes aside, Microsoft obviously has something brewing in the area of Grid computing, and they have a history of proving they can't be ignored. - http://weblog.infoworld.com/gridmeter/archives/2006/01/ whats_microsoft.html

And you might already know that Tony Hey and Fabrizio Gagliardi both joined Microsoft last year. Tony Hey is an internationally recognized leader in parallel computing and has been a key driver in Web Services standards, especially as they relate to Grid computing. Fabrizio is taking leave from CERN where he served as Project Director for EGEE.

Filed Under:

Largest known prime

2006-01-03T23:18:00.000+05:00

Sharon Gaudin reports that researchers at Central Missouri State University discovered the largest known prime number using a grid of about 70,000 computers. The number is 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1 and has about 9.1 million digits.

read complete story at: http://www.gridcomputingplanet.com/news/article.php/3573946

Filed Under:

Strength in Numbers: Taking the Right Angle on Grid Computing

2005-12-29T01:14:00.000+05:00

Jack M. Germain talks about the business aspects of grid computing in this article on Top Tech News.

The amount of computing resources put into place with a grid architecture can be enormous," said Jonathan Eunice, principal I.T. adviser for Illuminata. "Companies get to add the equivalent of a couple thousands PCs and that added horsepower that they do not have to pay for." - Complete article at: http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=40364

Filed Under:

Grid storage and open standards

2005-12-29T00:30:00.000+05:00

A good writeup on the need for standards for grid computing.

What do you need to know to build a storage grid based on open standards? What current technologies can you apply today, and what's coming in the future? In this article, a storage expert takes you on a guided tour through the established standards, the emerging standards, and the standards-related activities relevant to grid storage - Read more at: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/grid/library/gr-storstan/

Filed Under:

Alchemi 1.0: A .NET-based Enterprise Grid Framework - Released

2005-12-17T23:58:00.000+05:00

Dec 15, 2005, Melbourne, AustraliaAlchemi (http://www.alchemi.net/) is an "open source" software framework that allows you to painlessly aggregate the computing power of networked machines into a virtual supercomputer (computational grid) and to develop applications to run on enterprise grids. It has been developed at the GRIDS Laboratory within the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne, as part of the Gridbus project (http://www.gridbus.org). The development of Alchemi is partially sponsored by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and Microsoft (via academic support program in Australia). Most importantly, it is also supported by many other volunteers and community of developers through SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/alchemi See more details at:http://www.alchemi.net/1_0_0.html
http://www.alchemi.net/

Filed Under:

Schools to be part of Singapore National Grid

2005-12-10T23:49:00.000+05:00

Some of the 120,000 computers in Singapore schools will be linked up to become part of the Singapore Grid, a high speed network that allows users to collaborate by sharing computing resources on the Internet, Channel NewsAsia reported Tuesday.

It said that Singapore is believed to be among the pioneers in the world to extend grid computing beyond research institutes.

See complete story at:
http://english.people.com.cn/200512/07/eng20051207_226195.html
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/
182186/1/.html

Singapore National Grid Website: http://www.ngp.org.sg/

Filed Under:

A Look into the Future of Grid Research

2005-12-10T23:42:00.000+05:00

This article by Wolfgang Gentzsch, has been forwarded by Ashiq Bhai. Really very interesting wrap up of the Grid 2005. Following is an abstract of what he has to say.

I am talking about Grid 2005, this year's International Workshop on Grid Computing in Seattle, just before this year's Supercomputing. In its sixth year, this year's Grid workshop featured a program committee of over 100 computer scientists that reads like the "Who's Who" of the distributed computing community, selecting 30 papers and 18 posters out of almost 200 submissions. This is for sure one of the highest quality research conferences on Grid computing in the Universe, framed this year by visionaries (and veterans) like Dennis Gannon from Indiana University and his keynote on research challenges for the next generation of Grid systems, and Fran Berman (SDSC), Fabrizio Gagliardi (EGEE, now Microsoft), Carl Kesselman (UCLA/ISI) and Mark Linesch (GGF and HP) on the panel titled "What Will Grids Look Like in Five Years."

The complete article is avaiable at:
http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mid=517545&xsl=story.xsl

Filed Under:

A Day in the Life: Grid Computing: Adoption Realities

2005-11-16T18:19:00.000+05:00

A good read, even though has a marketing touch: A Day in the Life: Grid Computing: Adoption Realities

Filed Under:

Grid-Computing

Grid Computing and Industry

2005-11-16T18:05:00.000+05:00

This week, I have been seeing a lot of articles and news items related to the big player's role in grid computing.

Some of the links that prompted me to write this blog are:
Keeping an eye on Apple's Grid computing efforts
Microsoft High-Performance Computing Strategy
Platform Computing and IBM Push the Boundaries of Supercomputing Performance
Grid Computing and Clustering -- the next OS battleground

Filed Under:

Grid Standards Groups Weigh Merger

2005-11-16T17:34:00.000+05:00

The Global Grid Forum (GGF) and Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) are in discussions that could lead to a merger of the two organizations, GGF Chair Mark Linesch said in an announcement late last week.

See complete story here: http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mid=508707

This is a very good development as we will see more collaboration between industry and academia as well as standardization.

Filed Under:

Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN)

2005-11-14T01:34:00.000+05:00

Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN) is a nationwide educational intranet connecting premiere educational and research institutions of the country. PERN is designed for collaborative research, knowledge sharing, resource sharing, and distance learning by connecting people through the use of Intranet and Internet resources. Though late, this is a good initiative for Pakistani universities and research institutions.

Even though the networking requirement of most real grid applications are much more than provided by PERN, a developing country like Pakistan can not afford to have another dedicated high-speed network. So, PERN would be our starting point to any real grid computing implementation in Pakistan.

PERN utilizes the existing Optical Fiber System (OFS) of Pakistan Telecommunication Private Limited (PTCL) and National Telecommunication Limited (NTC) and IP/ATM backbone of NTC is utilized for the core network of PERN. The network design of PERN consists of three nodal points at Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi as shown in figure below. Most educational institutions are connected to their respective nodal point by a 256 Kb/s to 6Mbps link from the nearest exchange of NTC/PTCL using OFS, DXX, DRS or VSAT, whichever is technically feasible.

PERN Architecture

According to PERN website, the current interconnection of three main nodes is on 34x34 Mbps and Internet connectivity is 65 Mbps for Islamabad, 33 Mbps for Lahore and 57 Mbps for Karachi. This architecture allows institutions to pool resources with each other through national fiber network and to access Internet from the respective nodal points. The bandwidths provisioned and planned through the PERN network for various universities can be found on PERN website.

In order to elaborate the differences between PERN and similar networks of developed countries, the following is the architecture of the United Kingdom National Backbone Research and Education Network (see the figure below). The figure especially shows differences in speed and reliability of the two networks.

United Kingdom National Backbone Research and Education Network

Comments on the design, performance and architecture of PERN are welcome as I am in the process of collecting and consolidating views from the industry people on this topic.

Filed Under:

EPSRC Funded PhD Studentship in Grid Computing

2005-11-13T00:08:00.000+05:00

Closing date for applications is 17th November 2005

The Sensors, Instrumentation and Radiation Effects (SIRE) research group invites applications for an EPSRC funded studentship with immediate effect.

The SIRE group has a broad research programme in the areas of experimental particle physics, developing detectors, and grid/distributed computing.

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Geneva, Switzerland is about to begin an exciting and cutting edge experiment in the world. It is projected to produce tens of petabytes of data per year from 2007. This huge data will require extensive distributed Grid technologies to analyse and store it (LHC Computing Grid, http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/).

The group is also working on a running experiment at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) called BaBar which is producing and analysing large amount of data on B mesons. Currently, it uses the largest object database in the world (800TB+).

The successful candidate can contribute directly to developing Grid Middleware for the LCG or e-Science projects, working with worldwide expects on Grid Computing at RAL (Rutherford Appleton Lab), CERN in Gevena and SLAC at Stanford University in California. He/she will have a chance to attend short and long term visits at these research labs.

Candidates should have a good honours degree in Physics, Computer Science, or related numerate subject. It would be beneficial to have a keen interest in computing: in particular Java/C++, the Linux operating system and distributed/Grid computing

Applications with a CV and informal inquiries should be directed to:

Dr Akram Khan

email: akram@slac.stanford.edu

Filed Under:

Ten Technologies to watch in 2006

2005-11-06T17:14:00.000+05:00

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/originalContent/
0,289142,sid19_gci1137889,00.html

Gartner Inc.'s 2006 Top 10 Strategic Technologies list holds out lots of hope, not just hype, for virtualization and grid computing, among others. Analysts Carl Claunch and David Cearley are predicting these technologies will be mature enough to offer value in the next 18 to 36 months, and that means they should be on your list of technologies to research -- or adopt -- in the coming year.

Lists the following:

Virtualization
Grid computing
Service-oriented business applications (SOBAs)
Pervasive computing
OLED/LEP technologies
Location-aware services
Linux
Desktop search tools
Microcommerce
Instant messaging

More at:
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/originalContent/
0,289142,sid19_gci1137889,00.html

Filed Under:

technology

Setting up a Grid – The requirements

2005-10-18T01:18:00.000+05:00

Setting up a grid involves a lot of different steps. Even the simplest of all grids would require a very good network infrastructure, storage and computational resources as well as the middleware and resource managers. The other features can be added as required and desired.

Infrastructure Requirements: The Network

Network is the heart of any successful grid implementation. Most grid implementations are using the high speed fiber optics backbone providing speeds up to 40 Gbps. If the network connectivity is not reliable or appropriate bandwidth is not available, the grid applications deployed on top of it should communicate as little as possible and support high latency, or the deployment will fail. For normal data-intensive or low latency application, high speed fiber optics network should be there.

At present, grids are built on high-performance network. According to Berman et. al., by the year 2002, most of those networks had roughly 10Gbps backbone. Examples of such networks include Abilene Network (USA), SuperJanet backbone (UK), GEANT Network (intra-Europe), APAN (Asia Pacific), and others. A given institution is connected via about 1 Gbps link to the backbone and has around a 100 Mbps LAN. This means that there is a 10:1:0.1 Gbps ratio between national, organizational, desktop links.

A Global Terabit Research Network (GTRN) is expected to enhance this ratio many times. GTRN aims to enhance the international, national, organizational, optical desktop and copper desktop link ratios to 1000:1000:100:10:1 Gbps, a 100 times increase from the current state. The NSF funded TeraGrid project, has one of the most striking network infrastructure with four locations spread across USA linked with a backbone of 40 Gbps.

Hardware Requirements: Shared Resources

Resources are the main building block of the grid. The whole concept was introduced to share resources, so there should be redundant and highly-available resources. Even simple grid systems include a combination of high speed and high capacity data storage in addition to a large amount of computational power. Additionally, a scientific grid consists of specialized analysis, visualization and scientific equipments. Other specialized grids have other components as well.

Software Requirements: The Grid Middleware

The software layer between the operating system and the applications is termed as middleware. It provides a variety of services required by an application to function correctly. Middleware has recently re-emerged as a means of integrating software applications running in distributed heterogeneous environments. Middleware thus refers to the software which is common to multiple applications and builds on the network transport services to enable ready development of new applications and network services. CORBA, for example, defines a middleware standard.

In a grid, the middleware is used to hide the heterogeneous nature and provide users and applications with a homogeneous and seamless environment by providing a set of standardized interfaces to a variety of services [9]. With the use of service oriented architecture in grid computing (see next section for details), this middleware consists of the services commonly used by the grid applications like authentication, resource access and management, etc. Examples of such middleware include the Globus toolkit.

With so many resources available, these need to be looked up by probable users and need to be managed properly. This task is performed by resource managers which manage resources like processing power by distributing it among the many applications depending upon their priority. GRAM, the Globus Resource Allocation Manager is one such resource manager which is an integral part of the Globus toolkit.

Considering that the main purpose of most grid implementations is distributed processing, we also need a meta-scheduler most of the times.

Most of the grids would also require specialized software applications making use of the available grid resources in the most optimal way. These applications are usually built using the services provided by the middleware, resource managers, job schedulers and other components.

Software Requirements: Grid Portals - The User Interface for the Grid

In order to provide easy access to the grid services and the resources, a web portal like interface to grid was introduced called The Grid Portal. Just like a web portal allows users to access various resources via a web interface, a grid portal provides access to grid resources. Grid portal utilizes the web browser as a thin client and thus has the advantage of having minimal setup time on the machines of the users. A typical grid portal provides functionality to authenticate users, permit them to access remote resources, help them make decisions about scheduling jobs, and allow users to access and manipulate grid enabled databases and file systems. Grid portal access can also be personalized by the use of profiles, which are created and stored for each portal user.

Many teams have come up with various applications and projects helpful in the development of the grid portals which include NPACI Hotpage, OGCE, SDSC Grid Port Toolkit, Mississippi Computational Web Portal, Lattice Portal, Grid Portal Development Kit and many others.

Grid Certification Authority

The Grid Security Model as described in Globus Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) is an extension of public key infrastructure (X.509 certificates). In the short term the user generates his short-term proxy using his long-term certificate. Grid implementations thus require presence of a Certification Authority to issue certificates to users and hosts. Grid Certificates are just like the normal certificates used on the Internet and even the same authorities can be used. But due to security considerations, it is expected that grid has its own certification authorities.

Filed Under:

Microsoft and Grid Computing

2005-10-12T17:18:00.000+05:00

According to a CNET News article: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5889460.html

Microsoft is creating a "Cluster Compute" version of Windows and intends to work more closely with grid industry standards bodies, Tony Hey, the company's corporate vice president of technical computing, said in an interview with CNET News.com on Tuesday.

Filed Under:

CCGrid 2006 - Call for Papers

2005-10-11T00:56:00.000+05:00

CCGrid 2006: 6th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid
16-19 May 2006
Singapore

http://pdcc.ntu.edu.sg/ccgrid2006
http://www.ccgrid.org

!!Submission Deadline: 15th November 2005!!

------------------------------------------------------------

SCOPE
-----

CCGrid 2006 is the sixth in a series of successful international conferences and
for the first time will take place in the heart of South-East Asia ? Singapore.
The conference will be held at Singapore Management University in the centre of
Singapore. The past years have seen tremendous challenges with the convergence
of Web Services and Grid Technology. There have been major initiatives ?
internationally as well as locally ? within the community that has taken up
these challenges. Grid Technology enables us to make a major change in the
paradigm for conducting our work with the holy grail of ?computing on tap?,
which in particular includes collaborative sharing. With this in mind CCGrid 2006
provides researchers and practitioners with an excellent opportunity to share
their research and experience at the cross-roads of Grid Technology. The areas
of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
? Web Services Flow Languages
? Programming Models, Tools & Environments
? Peer-to-Peer computing
? Information Services
? Resource Exchange Architectures
? Grid-based Problem Solving Environments
? Scientific, Engineering and Commercial Grid Applications
? Middleware for Clusters and Grids
? Parallel File Systems & Wide Area File Systems
? Scheduling and Load Balancing
? Performance Evaluation and Modelling
? Resource Management and Scheduling
? Computational Data and Information Grid
? Architectures and Systems
? Grid Economies and Service Architectures

PAPER SUBMISSION
----------------

Authors are invited to submit a full length 8-page paper of double column text
using single spaced 10 pt size type on 8.5?x11? paper, as per IEEE manuscript
guidelines. Detailed paper submission instructions will be placed on the
conference web-page. It is expected that the proceedings will be published by
the IEEE Computer Society Press, USA, and will be made available online through
the IEEE Digital Library.

SPECIAL EVENTS ? WORKSHOPS - TUTORIALS
--------------------------------------

Those wishing to organise workshops, present tutorials on emerging topics or
participate in the industry track are invited to contact the respective chair
for further information.

IMPORTANT DATES
---------------

Papers Due: 15th November 2005
Camera-Ready Papers: 15th February 2006
Notification of Acceptance: 15th January 2006
Tutorial Proposals: 15th January 2006

Filed Under:

Grid Computing Books

2005-10-08T19:43:00.000+05:00

The following are some of the good grid computing books. I do have some of them, contact me for more details, if you are in Pakistan.

The Grid: Blueprint for a Future Computing Infrastructure, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998
The Grid 2: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003
Grid Computing Making The Global Infrastructure a Reality, John Wiley & Sons, 2003
Grid Computing - Practical Guide to Technology and Applications, Charles River Media, 2004
IBM Grid Computing (On Demand Series), Prentice Hall, 2003

For more and latest grid computing books, refer to Google Print:
http://print.google.com/print?q=%22grid+computing%22+
intitle:grid&ie=UTF-8

Filed Under:

Types of Grids

2005-10-06T17:05:00.000+05:00

Grid have been divided into a number of types, on the basis of their use:

Computational Grid: These grids provide secure access to huge pool of shared processing power suitable for high throughput applications and computation intensive computing.

Data Grid: Data grids provide an infrastructure to support data storage, data discovery, data handling, data publication, and data manipulation of large volumes of data actually stored in various heterogeneous databases and file systems.

Collaboration Grid: With the advent of Internet, there has been an increased demand for better collaboration. Such advanced collaboration is possible using the grid. For instance, persons from different companies in a virtual enterprise can work on different components of a CAD project without even disclosing their proprietary technologies.

Network Grid: A Network Grid provides fault-tolerant and high-performance communication services. Each grid node works as a data router between two communication points, providing data-caching and other facilities to speed up the communications between such points.

Utility Grid: This is the ultimate form of the Grid, in which not only data and computation cycles are shared but software or just about any resource is shared. The main services provided through utility grids are software and special equipments. For instance, the applications can be run on one machine and all the users can send their data to be processed to that machine and receive the result back.

Filed Under:

Grid-Computing

The uses of Grid Computing

2005-10-02T16:45:00.000+05:00

Grid was primarily devised for computationally intensive scientific work like systems design, data analysis and visualization, climate research, and so on (see Error! Reference source not found.). Hence it was used for these purposes in various projects. Later on the concept was generalized to sharing just about any kind of resource. The new capabilities provided by the grid greatly facilitate the scientists and engineers. Some of the ways grid can be used are:

High throughput computing
Distributed Supercomputing
Data-intensive computing
On demand computing (utility computing)
Collaboration within and among organizations
Data sharing between various offices and partners
Virtual enterprises and virtual markets could be developed easily using grids
Providing virtual services, like virtual lectures, virtual stores, etc
To connect and share heterogeneous distributed resources

Filed Under:

Grid-Computing

What is Grid Computing

2005-10-01T00:05:00.000+05:00

Grid computing is an infrastructure that supports large-scale, coordinated, resource sharing among heterogeneous systems that span organizational and geographic boundaries in a dynamic manner.

Ian Foster has provided a checklist to identify a grid saying that a grid is one which:

Coordinates resources not subject to centralized control
Uses standard, open, general-purpose interfaces and protocols
Delivers non-trivial qualities of service

Grid computing can be though of as a distributed computing infrastructure that can provide all computing resources as and when required just like the electrical grids and other utility grids do.

Grid computing involves coordinating and sharing computing,data,network resources that are dynamically and geographically dispersed. Resource grid involves utility computing,on-demand and adaptive enterprises Data grid focuses on life-cycle control,distributed file systems and Web services,like google. Compute grid,the most common in use now,Focus on servers and PCs,the most sought after grid. This has been fueling advanced research in science and academia, now entering the corporate world.

Filed Under:

Grid-Computing

The popularity of distributed systems

2005-09-28T02:06:00.000+05:00

A Distributed System can be defined as one in which hardware and software components at networked computers communicate and coordinate their activity by sharing resources such as information, data, compute cycles, bandwidth and storage. Examples include the World Wide Web, Clusters, Mobile Computing, Grid Computing, and many others.

Historically, workstations and personal computing systems used to work individually solving smaller problems while supercomputers were used for complex problems. With the increase in the network speeds and storage density, coupled with the availability of high-end computers and communication equipments at reasonable prices, this trend has changed during the last few decades. It is now agreed upon that we are living in an exponential world with transistor count doubling every 18 months (Moore’s Law), storage density doubling every 12 months, and fiber optics speeds doubling every 9 months (see the figure below).

Moore’s Law vs. storage improvements vs. optical improvements. Graph from Scientific American (Jan-2001) by Cleo Vilett.

This shows that Network speeds will grow at double the rate of processor speed, thus the case for distributed computing becomes even stronger.

Filed Under:

distributed-systems

PAREGIN: Pakistan Research and Education Grid Initiative

2005-09-25T01:03:00.000+05:00

MS Thesis Abstract

Ever since the off the shelf networked computers became popular, the interest of people in distributed systems is increasing. Many architectures, strategies and libraries were made. Grid Computing is one such emerging new paradigm for next-generation distributed computing. It enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed heterogeneous resources.

A number of teams all over the world are working on various aspects of grid computing. This work is an effort to have a research and education grid in Pakistan considering its specific limitations and requirements. It studies the various implementation architectures of grids and based upon the results, proposes Pakistan Research and Education Grid Initiative (PAREGIN). PARAGIN is collaborative grid architecture suitable for Pakistan and provides guidelines for the middleware, network infrastructure and services useful for researchers, students and teachers. The work also includes cost and usability analysis of the services. Based upon the proposal, a prototype grid was implemented along with a smaller set of services.

See complete thesis here.

Filed Under:

The Grid Computing Weblog

2005-09-24T01:01:00.000+05:00

This is the blog started on the basis of the work done as part of my MS Thesis Research. A lot of postings would come directly from the actual thesis while I will also be posting the notes from my research diary.

You can see the complete version of my thesis here.

Filed Under: