Speaker
Describe the added value of the Grid for the scientific/technical activity you (plan to) do on the Grid. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community and the relevance for other scientific or business applications
We propose to bridge the EGEE and Xtremweb infrastructures by making
the Xtremweb system appear as a standard Computing Element on the
EGEE
infrastructure, bringing more resources into the EGEE infrastructure
from a currently unutilized pool of resources. The bridging could
potentially increase overall efficiency by off-loading smaller tasks
to the desktop systems and freeing larger, "institutional" resources
for larger tasks. Primarily, however, the merged system provides an
unique interface to the users, freeing them from costly ports of
their
software to different systems.
With a forward look to future evolution, discuss the issues you have encountered (or that you expect) in using the EGEE infrastructure. Wherever possible, point out the experience limitations (both in terms of existing services or missing functionality)
Three areas requires further work. The most trivial is binding
for the more recent
gLite CE. Then, to fully take advantage of the two systems, the
gLite developers
must make the software portable enough to run on the volatile,
heterogeneous
resources typical of desktop grids. Lastly, an efficient grid
meta-schedulling needs
predictive mechanisms that forecast the size and type of volatile
resources. This is
a general issue that must be solved regardless of the desktop
grid implementation.
Describe the scientific/technical community and the scientific/technical activity using (planning to use) the EGEE infrastructure. A high-level description is needed (neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references).
LAL provides resources to its physicists both through the EGEE
infrastructure, an
institutional grid, and through Xtremweb, a desktop grid.
Xtremweb developed by
LRI-INRIA and LAL-IN2P3 aims to construct large-scale distributed
systems by
aggregating individual resources in virtual fault-tolerant
clusters. It is similar
concept to BOINC developed at Berkeley. Currently, these two
sets of resources serve
different groups within the laboratory and present markedly
different interfaces to
their
Report on the experience (or the proposed activity). It would be very important to mention key services which are essential for the success of your activity on the EGEE infrastructure.
We have built a prototype that successfully links the EGEE grid
infrastructure to resources managed by Xtremweb. Currently the
prototype uses Xtremweb resources that have the gLite client software
installed to ensure users have the environment that they expect. A
standard gatekeeper (LCG CE) acts as the interface and rudimentary
state information is published to permit grid-level scheduling.
