EGEE'08 Istanbul

Session

User Interaction and Workflows

24 Sept 2008, 16:00

Harbiye Askeri Museum

Description

Science is the main goal of the EGEE Grid Project, and goals are to run scientific applications on the grid to overtake the current hardware limitations. But before running the scientific applications at a large scale, the first challenge is to port them to the grid, and provide simple access to these grid-enabled applications. At this step, users are looking for standards; standards for the interaction with the grid itself, but also for running complex applications involving for example large bulk jobs or chained-jobs into workflows. Consequently, users seek various mechanisms to shield them from service API or CLI changes and to allow them to use the maximum number of resources. In this way, users are looking for high level interface such as portals to interact to the Grid, but although standard application programming interface (APIs) or Web Services at the programatic level.

Many communities habitually work through web portals or have other mechanisms for easy access to computing or data resources. And portals will certainly be the best way to provide an easier grid-access to the larger par of the scientific communities. There are several different portal implementations available and working with gLite. The same people will want to deploy also customized portals and it is important that the various EGEE policies are respected when deploying such services. In this way, the EGEE PORTAL working group, for example, aims to propose "best-practice" rules for the access of portals to the grid. That means for example that the portal should be able to store data and run job on the grid by delegation of real users, or with its own credentials as a service virtual user.

Building scientific applications on the grid are most ot time implying complex workflow of different services and software. These workflows permit the integration and the re-use of different existing or new scientific codes and services, to provide new results. But there are complex to built on the grid and to interface with the different components and services. For this way of accessing the grid, developpers are also looking for standard APIs in a tightly-coupled application, or Web services in a weakly-coupled or distributed application.

This session will review some of the mechanisms that are currently used, how those are accommodated on the EGEE infrastructure, and the status of some proposed standards.

249. Data flow management with MOTEUR on the EGEE grid

Dr Johan Montagnat (CNRS)

24/09/2008, 16:00

Oral contribution

This talk will describe the MOTEUR workflow manager and illustrate its capability to handle complex application data flows through several example. MOTEUR is a service-oriented gLite-interfaced workflow manager which adopts a data-flow centric approach to describe application pipelines in an accessible visual interface with a rich and compact application logic description framework.

250. Dynamic Management of Virtual Appliances with the OpenNebula Engine

Ignacio Martin Llorente (Universidad Complutense), Tino Vazquez

24/09/2008, 16:20

Oral contribution

Grid users often require specific versions of different software components (e.g. operating system, libraries or post-processing utilities). The cost of the installation, configuration and maintenance of user-specific or VO-specific worker nodes limits the flexibility of the infrastructure, and so the adoption of Grid computing. OpenNebula is the name of a new open-source technology that...

251. Uniform access to the Grid - Migrating Desktop Platform

Marcin Plociennik (Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center)

24/09/2008, 16:40

Oral contribution

The Migrating Desktop Platform is an advanced graphical user interface to grid resources that could be useful for grid application developers, by speeding up the application integration process as well as for grid users, hiding the complexity of the grid middleware(also gLite). The Migrating Desktop Platform is a uniform environment for grid application that enhances gLite with user-friendly...

272. Discussion: What could we expect today to make the Grid usable by most Scientists ? And in the Future ?

Dr Christophe Blanchet (CNRS IBCP)

24/09/2008, 17:00

Oral contribution

The discussion will follow the presentations of these several grid systems built to ease the user interface and workflows enactement on the Grid. This discussion, in order to initiate an overview about current usage of Grid by Sciences, will be angled firstly towards a user perspective in Biology. Some tracks about the future of Bioinformatics at a large and distributed scale will be presented...