HPC club presentation A proposal for a campus-wide research grid Barry Wilkinson Department of Computer Science UNC-Charlotte Dec. 2, 2005

Background Grid Computing Using geographically distributed and interconnected computers together for computing and for resource sharing.

Can be applied to campus-wide resources. Many Examples –Michigan –Dartmouth –University of Virginia –….

Goals of campus-wide research grid Share resources without having to use centralized systems Cost-effective solution to computing resources Build teams, collaborate, collaborate, collaborate, … Get big interdisciplinary grants

Grid Portal From a user’s perspective, must have a portal “ A web-based application server enhanced with the necessary software to communicate to grid services and resources” “Provides application scientist a customized view of software and hardware resources from a web browser” [1] [1] “Grid Computing Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality” ed. F. Berman, G. C. Fox and A. J. G. Hey, Wiley, 2003, Chapter 27 “The Grid portal development kit” by J. Novotny.

From a paper “GridSphere: A Portal Framework For Building Collaborations” by J. Novotny, M. Russell, and O. Wehrens

Grid Portals Uses a Web browser interface –Can use from anywhere. Hides details of Grid middleware –Good!!

Grid Portals Provides –Access to grid information –Access to grid services –Automated execution of applications/jobs –Workflow management –File management –Single sign-on to grid resources

Access to Grid Services Security Services –management of certificates –access to virtual organization (people) Remote File Management –access to files and directories –moving files Remote job management –job submission –workflow management

Access to Information Portals also provide access to information -- anything related to tasks at hand, including communication with virtual organization. In fact, some portals started simply as informational portals in the same vein as web portals such as yahoo.

Grid Portal Toolkit History Several portal “toolkits” developed since mid-1990’s. Used for application specific grid projects, or for general-purpose grid portals

Portal Implementation Should be flexible, meet grid industry standards, be able to be extended using parts developed by others. General approach currently is to use “software components” called portlets.

Portals with Portlets Portal server consists of portlets Each portlet provides certain functionality and a window within the portal. Each portlet can be associated with a particular grid service User can have any number of portlets as he/she wishes (will be associated with user’s persistent context).

Portal Server MyProxy Server Metadata Directory Service(s) Directory & index Services Application Factory Services Messaging and group collaboration Event and logging Services Portal Server Adapted from slides “The NCSA Alliance Portal and the Open Grid Computing Environment Project” by D. Gannon, G. Fox, B. Plale, M. Pierce, M. Thomas, C. Severance, G. von Lazewski, and J. Alameda.

Portlet Approach to Grid Services Portal Server MyProxy Server Metadata Directory Service(s) Directory & index Services Application Factory Services Messaging and group collaboration Event and logging Services Portlet 1 Portlet 2 Portlet 3 Portlet 4 Portlet 5 Portlet 6 Adapted from slides “The NCSA Alliance Portal and the Open Grid Computing Environment Project” by D. Gannon, G. Fox, B. Plale, M. Pierce, M. Thomas, C. Severance, G. von Lazewski, and J. Alameda.

A Pane and portlet Proxy Manager Portlet The current Visible pane Adapted from slides “The NCSA Alliance Portal and the Open Grid Computing Environment Project” by D. Gannon, G. Fox, B. Plale, M. Pierce, M. Thomas, C. Severance, G. von Lazewski, and J. Alameda.

Advantages of Portlet Approach Easy to add new grid services and reconfigure user’s view (context) Different software developers can provide portals to be plugged into portal –Many parties developing portal and portlet tools -- Jetspeed (Apache), Websphere (IBM), GridSphere, … Portal/portlet standard called JSR 168 emerging (portlet Java Specification Request open standard).

National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI) Started in 2001 initially over 3 years “to create and deploy advanced network services that simplify access to diverse Internet information and services.” Provides a centralized location for important grid software. Current NMI package includes Globus, Condor, MPI-G2, and: – a new grid portal project called OGCEGrid (funding started Sept 2003).

Consortium established “Fall 2003 to foster collaborations and shareable components with portal developers worldwide” The following screenshots taken from

Membership: Join/participate in different topic groups (Group tabs across top).

Schedule: Maintain a personal or group calendar.

Resources: Users and groups can upload/share documents and URLs.

Discussion: Participate in discussions with other members of your group

Chat: Engage other members of your group in online discussion.

Proxy Manager and Job Submit: Obtain/manage Grid credentials to access Grid resources through browser. Also shown are GRAM job launchers and sample "ping" portlet.

LDAP Browser: Navigate LDAP server of your choice.

Grid FTP: Use your credential to browse remote directories/upload/download files.

Grid Context: Store arbitrary web objects (movies, web pages, audio files) in a customizable, annotated directory tree.

GridPort Information Repository Portlets: Several GPIR portlets available for browsing.

GridPort Job Sequencing Portlets To set up sequences of jobs through a scheduler.

Anabas Impromptu: real time shared display, audio, and chats.

Newsgroups: Portlets allow users to participate in/administer online newsgroup.

OGRE Demo: use of OGRE for job management.

Java CoG Workflow: Portlet allows you to set up a Java CoG-based Workflow.

Application Management: Example interface around MyProxy, GRAM, and GridFTP.

Condor Portlets: To submit and monitor jobs through Condor.

More Information JSR 168 Portlet specification GridLab, The GridSphere Portal Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Grid (NEESGrid)