CERN Computing Seminar

The OurGrid Project: Grid Computing for Bag-of-Tasks Applications

by Walfredo Cirne (Universidade Federale de Campina Grande, Brazil)

Europe/Zurich
IT Auditorium (CERN)

IT Auditorium

CERN

Description
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Grid Computing has appeared with the enticing promise of turning computing into utility. The vision is 'plug in the grid and solve your problem'. However, turning the grid vision into reality is no trivial matter. Despite the great progress made in the last years, Grid Computing is still far from reality to most users. The OurGrid Project aims to deliver grid technology that can be used today by current users to solve present problems. To achieve this goal, OurGrid chooses a different trade-off compared to most grid projects. It forfeits supporting arbitrary applications in favor of supporting only Bag-of-Tasks applications. Bag-of-Tasks applications are those parallel applications whose tasks are independent of each other. Despite their simplicity, BoT applications are used in a variety of scenarios, including data mining, massive searches, parameter sweeps, monte-carlo simulations, fractal calculations, computational biology, and computer imaging. The OurGrid solution has three major components: the MyGrid broker, the OurGrid community, and SWAN sandboxing. MyGrid is a broker for Bag-of-Tasks applications that allows a user to run her application on all processors she has access to. The OurGrid community is a peer-to-peer network designed to enable worldwide resource sharing, without relying upon grid economy infrastructure (which is not deployed today). SWAN leverages the Bag-of-Tasks characteristic of the application to provide sandboxing that allows sites to safely run guest. grid applications. All OurGrid components are open source. MyGrid has been available for 1.5 years and has a user community of around 50 users. OurGrid is in prototype stage, deployed in a small-scale experimental community. SWAN is in late development stage.


Organiser(s): Julian Blake / IT Department
More information: http://cern.ch/computing-seminars
© CERN 2005 - Miguel Angel Marquina / IT Department
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