Speaker
Dr
David Colling
(Imperial College London)
Description
While remote control of, and data collection from, instrumentation was part of the
initial Grid concept most recent Grid developments have concentrated on the sharing
of distributed computational and storage resources. The GRIDCC project is working
to bring instrumentation back to the Grid alongside compute and storage resources.
To this end we have defined an Instrument Element (IE) as a virtualization of
physical instrument. The IE can be regarded as analogous to the Compute Element
(CE) and Storage Element (SE) defined in other projects. Much of the power of using
instrumentation over a Grid is only realized when it is used in conjunction with
existing compute and storage resources. GRIDCC achieves this by building on the
gLite infrastructure being developed by the EGEE project. Many features that can be
regarded as desirable within other Grid projects become essential when
instrumentation is introduced and so must be addressed by the GRIDCC project. These
include the ability to work collaboratively with colleagues in remote locations,
guaranteed quality of service and advanced reservation of resources. The GRIDCC
project will produce a generic solution for instrumentation on a Grid. We have a
number of exemplar instrumentation use cases selected to cover the full range of
system requirements. We plan to implement our solution on a limited number of these
instrument use cases. One such "instrument" is the CMS detector where it is planned
to implement the run controller, which is responsible for configuring, controlling
and monitoring the experiment, as an IE. A second example is the Synchrotron
Radiation Sotorage Ring Elettra where the accelerator will be operated remotely
using GRIDCC technology. In this paper we describe the GRIDCC architecture and the
progress towards its implementation as the project approaches the midpoint of its
three years of funding.
Summary
We report progress of the GRIDCC project.
Primary author
Dr
David Colling
(Imperial College London)
