Description
Porting applications to the Grid using the EDGeS Application Development Methodology (90 mins)
Tamas Kiss, Ad Emmen
Abstract:
A Grid can be a powerful number crunching machine bringing the power of thousands of processors to an application developer's finger tips. Although current Grid infrastructures offer significant amount of resources to run computation and data intensive applications, some scenarios still overgrow the capabilities of existing
Grids. Unfortunately, the two main types of Grids infrastructures, Service and Desktop Grid systems, were not interoperable until recently. The European EDGeS
project is currently developing a bi-directional bridge connecting this diverse collection of resources.
Programming an application for a Grid is not easy. Current Grid application development efforts very often use ad-hoc approaches only when porting the applications. Developers do not follow any suggested methodology and this may result
is poorly documented systems that do not fulfill user expectations. In order to avoid this trap, support application developers and provide guidelines when porting
an application to the EDGeS Grid platform, the EDGeS Application Development Methodology (EADM) has been specified.
This tutorial introduces the EDGeS Grid platform (EGEE extended with BOINC and XtremWeb Desktop Grids) and the EDGeS Application
Development Methodology. So far 12 applications from fields of bio-science, chemistry, physics, engineering, e-market, etc. have been ported to EDGeS. Case studies of tools that make the application development easier and examples for applications that have been ported to EDGeS using the EADM
are presented.
Target Audience:
Application developers that want to port an application to Desktop Grids. Representatives of EGEE user communities who want to port existing EGEE applications to the EDGeS infrastructure.
Lecturer:
Tamas Kiss
CV:
Tamas Kiss is a Senior Lecturer in Database Systems at the Department of Information Systems and Computing, and a researcher at the Centre for Parallel Computing at the
School of Informatics, University of Westminster, London. His research interests include parallel and Grid computing, and he has extended experience in the area of legacy code deployment, interoperation of Grid systems, and application porting to
service and desktop Grid systems. He led the design and development activities resulting in the Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Architecture (GEMLCA)
solution, now a Globus incubator project, within the UK EPSRC founded OGSA Testbed project. He contributed to the CoreGrid Network of Excellence project as the leader
of the Legacy Code Wrapping and Deployment Methodologies Research Group within the Institute on Grid Systems, Tools and Environments. He currently leads the Grid Application Support Service activity within the European EDGeS project.
Tamas has extended experience in teaching in higher education and giving Grid tutorials, lectures and hands-on sessions (e.g. GEMLCA/P-GRADE portal courses organised by the UK National e-Science Center (NESC) and the EGEE project). He co-authored one book and more than 50 scientific papers in journals and conference proceedings, and as book chapters.
