Speaker
David Cameron
(University of Oslo (NO))
Description
Grid middleware suites provide tools to perform the basic tasks of job
submission and retrieval and data access, however these tools tend to
be low-level, operating on individual jobs or files and lacking in
higher-level concepts. User communities therefore generally develop
their own application-layer software catering to their specific
communities' needs on top of the Grid middleware. It is thus important
for the Grid middleware to provide a friendly, well documented and
simple to use interface for the applications build on. The Advanced
Resource Connector (ARC), developed by NorduGrid, provides a Software
Development Kit (SDK) which enables applications to use the middleware
for job and data management. This paper presents the architecture and
functionality of the ARC SDK along with an example graphical
application developed with the SDK. The SDK consists of a set of
libraries accessible through Application Programming Interfaces (API)
in several languages. It contains extensive documentation and example
code and is available on multiple platforms. The libraries provide
generic interfaces and rely on plugins to support a given technology
or protocol and this modular design makes it easy to add a new plugin
if the application requires supporting additional technologies. The
ARC Graphical Clients package is a graphical user interface built on
top of the ARC SDK and the Qt toolkit and it is presented here as a
fully functional example of an application. It provides a graphical
interface to enable job submission and management at the click of a
button, and allows data on any Grid storage system to be manipulated
using a visual file system hierarchy, as if it were a regular file
system.
Primary authors
David Cameron
(University of Oslo (NO))
Jonas Lindemann
(Lund University)
Martin Skou Andersen
(University of Copenhagen (DK))
