Speaker
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).
SALUTE (Stochastic ALgorithms for Ultra-fast Transport in
sEmiconductors) is a
Grid application developed for solving computationally intensive
problems which
describe ultra-fast carrier transport in semiconductors. These
problems are
important for understanding the phenomena occurring in
semiconductors at
phemtosecond and nanometer scale.
Physicists, mathematicians and engineers are interested in either
development
of the simulation methods or their application for simulation of
nano-devices.
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
SALUTE is a computationally intensive application, which needs
vast amounts of
CPU power for achieving the desired accuracy and resolution. Its
user
community currently consists of scientists and engineers from 2
countries, and
we expect more users and functionalities to be added. The
application can be
used to study the properties and the phenomena relevant to several
semiconductor materials, used currently by the industry, from
GaAs to GaN. The
use of the Grid will provide not only CPU power, but also a
platform for sharing
the achieved results and avoiding of duplication of effort when
using the
application. The application can use up to thousands of CPUs, and
necessitates
adequate storage and networking capacities. We expect to be able
to add
more algorithms and functionality to SALUTE and gradually grow it
into a main
building block for a powerful Grid-based device simulator.
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.
SALUTE application currently runs on the SEE-GRID pilot grid
infrastructure,
which use the EGEE gLite middleware. The new implementation
scheme of
SALUTE employs: CE (lcg or glite flavour), WNs for computations,
gliteWMS for
workload distribution SE, FTS, AMGA for data and metadata management.
We built a custom server offering secure WebServices.
Communication with the
portal and the Grid is done from a graphical user interface. We
had to develop
a failover scheme, in order to cope with unreliable sites and
services, which in
principle is cumbersome and should be avoided. In order to
achieve accurate
results, we submitted thousands of jobs, and our observation was
that the
core services were mostly reliable, with the exception of
gliteWMS and gliteCE.
Our application stretched the SEE-GRID infrastructure in several
areas –
computation, communication, storage, exposing problems in
reliability that
would otherwise go undetected by functionality tests.
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)
We believe that the area of nanoscience should be better
represented on the
EGEE infrastructure, because of its importance for the future
technological
developments. We expect to increase our collaboration with users
from other
European countries and achieve greater accuracy in our
simulations by using
the resources of the EGEE production infrastructure. The
incomplete support of
MPI is a hindrance to many applications. We would also welcome
better data
management and better documentation.
