Grid MP at ISIS Tom Griffin, ISIS Facility

Introduction About ISIS Why Grid MP? About Grid MP Examples The future

Introduction ISIS - World's brightest pulsed neutron and muon source Running since 1984; 1600 user base; ~200 staff Neutrons and muons for condensed matter science Based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Driven by scientific output, not computer science

Why does ISIS need faster processing? Many compute intensive programs and problems Many applications which could be compute intensive Large range of application domains Simulations Analysing results Designing new instruments Visualising ideas

Why Grid MP? Neutron science not computer science Run by data analysis group Long interest in distributed computing Sun Workstations Condor Entropia DC Grid United Devices

Why Grid MP? ‘Out of box’ solution United Devices Grid MP is the ‘market leader’ Customers include: Johnson & Johnson GlaxoSmithKline Novartis National Physical Laboratory

Why Grid MP? Set up and running real applications in under 3 hours Excellent service level Get what you pay for! Queries and problems always answered promptly Active development

The United Devices System Server hardware We use two, dual Xeon servers client licenses Could (will) easily cope with more clients Software Servers run RedHat Linux Advanced Server / DB2 Clients available for Windows, Linux, SPARCs and Macs Programming MGSI – Web Services interface – XML, SOAP Accessed with C++ and Java classes etc Management Console Web browser based Can manage services, jobs, devices etc

Installing and Deploying the System Servers Complete set up in under 3 hours Virtually self maintaining Clients Windows only so far MSI Installer approx 20 seconds SMS MP Agent User Install to other OSs looks straightforward

Grid MP Mode of operation Client – Server Submitting PC breaks up Job Uploads data to server Programs reside on the server Server distributes Workunits to clients Clients return results to server User downloads results from server

Getting an Application Running Don’t touch executable code Wrap and upload executable Write ‘Application Service’ Typically only a few hours work

Some Features of the Grid MP System Device to Job matching Jobs have requirements – CPU, RAM, free disk space etc Programs have requirements Devices have preferences choose what programs they want to run Administrator can choose which users may submit to which machines

Some Features of the Grid MP System Timing options When to execute When to communicate

Some Features of the Grid MP System Good access/privileges control Very powerful Read, update, create, delete Can hook into Active Directory, Kerberos etc Built in basic reporting Job / Program CPU hours Performance stats

What do we use it for? 16 Applications running so far: Several molecular dynamics apps several neutron instrument simulation packages crystal structure solution maximum entropy calculations POVRay image rendering

What performance do we get? Roughly linear for current applications Running on 100 machines is 100 times faster Average CPU 2.03Ghz High percentage of AMD Athlons

Web Interface - Monitoring Jobs

Problems Encountered Mercifully few Only once the Grid’s fault Memory thresholding Odd program interactions Fortran and OpenGL

Easiest thing to blame Too abstract for some users (no big box) Stealing my cycles Expansion leads to political problems ‘Social’ Issues

Expansion Applied for 400 licenses (£60k) Change in licensing model The Future Bottom line Unlimited licenses Total $250K No technical issues Plenty of political issues Single sign-on