1. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk SCI-BUS project Pre-kick-off meeting University of Westminster Centre for Parallel Computing Tamas Kiss, Stephen Winter, Gabor Terstyanszky

2. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk University of Westminster in SCI-BUS Leaders of SA3: Application and User Support Service Major contribution to task JRA2.7: Blender rendering community gateway (together with Laurea University)

3. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk Centre for Parallel Computing School of Electronics and Computer Science Research in Cluster, Grid and Cloud computing 5 academic staff, 5 researchers, 6 PhD students Well funded by European and UK research grants (nearly £1 million funding last year) Main research focus: User friendly interfaces/science gateways to Grids and Clouds Making Desktop and Service Grids interoperable (EDGeS, EDGI and DEGISCO projects) Grid workflow systems and their interoperability (SHIWA project) Application support – porting applications to clusters, Grids and Clouds (Westminster Grid Application Support Service)

4. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk The University of Westminster Local DG Over 1500 Windows PCs from 6 different campuses Lifecycle of a node: 1. 1.PCs basically used by students/staff 2. 2.If unused, switch to Desktop Grid mode 3. 3.No more work from DG server -> shutdown (green solution)

5. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk 5 Service Grid Resources 96 node dedicated computing cluster (part of the UK National Grid Service)

6. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk 6 The UK National Grid Service (NGS) Core members: Manchester CCLRC RAL Oxford Leeds HPCx Partner sites Cardiff Lancaster Westminster Queens University of Belfast University of Glasgow +17 affiliate sites Data clusters Compute clusters Supercomputer stable highly-available production quality Grid service for the UK research community Westminster

7. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk 7 NGS P-GRADE GEMLCA Portal User friendly access to NGS resources portal website: https://grid2- portal.cpc.wmin.ac.uk Operated by the University of Westminster as NGS Partner Site Westminster

8. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk 8 Supporting users and application developers to run their applications on the Grid developing the Grid application deploying on the Grid Grid W-GRASSsupport Requirements Domain expertise user knowledge & effort W-GRASS Westminster GRid Application Support Service http://wgrass.wmin.ac.uk

9. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk Rendering Portal Service for the Blender User Community

10. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk What is Rendering? Rendering: the process of generating an image from a model, by means of computer programs the process of calculating effects in a video editing file to produce final video output Model: description of three-dimensional objects in a strictly defined language or data structure geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information, etc.

11. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk The rendering problem Rendering images/animations on stand-alone PCs is very time consuming. Even relatively short rendering tasks can run for hours/days. How to speed up the rendering process? Parallelize the task and run on computer farms instead of standalone PCs frames can be rendered independently

12. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk What is Blender? 3D graphics application that can be used for rendering (amongst other tasks) Open source - GNU GPL license large community behind it actively developed under the supervision of the Blender Foundation Linux, MAC OS and Windows versions

13. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk Rendering portal implementation Based on P-GRADE portal 2.5 (latest release at the time) Totally stripped down version – very simple user interface No user certificate management - free access No settings or customisations Compute resources are completely hidden from user No workflow editor – specific workflows are created automatically Functionality: Create a new rendering task - upload input file Submit rendering workflow Download results

14. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk Rendering portal functionalities Creating new rendering job Give unique name, define frames to be rendered Select Blender input file Workflow created by pressing this button

15. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk Rendering portal functionalities Execute workflow – download results

16. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk Some statistics December 2008 – September 2009 1200 registered user 9000 workflows 464,000 frames 28,000 CPU hours ~ 1167 CPU days 95 Gbyte input files – 180 Gbyte results Job submission on portal currently suspended to allow major upgrade

17. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk Issues addressed Dealing with the “tail” problem in Desktop Grids The problem: Whole workflow can be delayed by a few late jobs (due to job suspensions/interruptions). We term these late jobs the “tail” problem. Reduce the workflow makespan by replicating late jobs on the cluster.

18. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk Issues Addressed Security & Memory Demands The problem: Blender can execute potentially malicious Python scripts which can be embedded within input (.blend) files. Users typically requested huge memory resources on cluster nodes.

19. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk Virtualizing the DG The solution: Sandboxing. Use the Desktop Grid with Blender running in a system Virtual Machine (VM). Assign the guest OS physical memory from host and as much swap as desired (using virtual disks). Combination of Boinc and VirtualBox.