1. Web: www.omii.ac.uk Email: info@omii.ac.uk OMII-UK LiveCD Demonstrations – Providing Access to Computational Resources for Researchers AHM 2009 Steve Crouch, Justin Bradley, Yew Bie Cheng, Richard Boardman

2. Web: www.omii.ac.uk Email: info@omii.ac.uk http://www.omii.ac.uk/wiki/AHM2009 Background Evaluating Grid software is difficult! o Just want to have a go – determine suitability o Non-trivial: installation, configuration, security Evaluation should be easy o But not sacrifice demonstration of features o Provide pre-installed demonstrations of software using real scientific applications o Straightforward, minimum number of steps to use Time-to-evaluation should be minimal o Obtaining demonstration package o Initialising the package

3. Web: www.omii.ac.uk Email: info@omii.ac.uk http://www.omii.ac.uk/wiki/AHM2009 What is the LiveCD? Based around Slax LiveCD distribution Designed to run completely from system RAM o Doesnt access machine harddisk(s) Users can either: o Simply boot normal desktop/laptop from the CD o From within a virtual machine, boot from.iso image file 2GB RAM recommended!

4. Web: www.omii.ac.uk Email: info@omii.ac.uk http://www.omii.ac.uk/wiki/AHM2009 Whats on the LiveCD? Campus Grid Toolkit (CGT) o Includes GridSAM and AHE o Easy to install and use package providing access to computational and data resources e.g. PBS, Condor, Sun GridEngine, Globus, LSF o Demonstrations using computational resources: Fractal – calculate a Mandelbrot set, Primes – calculate prime numbers o Utilise PBS/Torque cluster (pre-installed) or local fork

5. Web: www.omii.ac.uk Email: info@omii.ac.uk http://www.omii.ac.uk/wiki/AHM2009 Whats on the LiveCD? RAPID o Design and deliver web portal interfaces to research applications requiring computational resources e.g. PBS, Condor, Sun GridEngine o RAPID-created portal demonstrations: RapidDemo – BLAST application – used by bioinformaticians to take a protein sequence, model it, and attempt to find match in protein database MinemDemo – Minem application – physics application to model charge distribution in a plasma