Speaker
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)
Although the solution is fully functional, it presents several
drawbacks, namely:
limited use of the potential benefits offered by the
virtualization technology, as
the underlying LRM is not aware of the nature of the job, and
limited support
for interactive jobs, as only batch jobs are supported. We are
working on the
integration of GridWay with the Globus Virtual Workspace service
which allows
a remote client to securely negotiate and manage a virtual resource.
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
Since the late 1990s, we have witnessed an extraordinary
development of Grid
technologies. Nowadays, different Grids are being deployed within
the context
of a growing number of national and transnational research
projects (e.g.
EGEE, TeraGrid or OSG). These projects have achieved unseen
levels of
resource sharing, offering a dramatic increase in the number of
processing and
storage resources that can be delivered to applications. However,
a growing
heterogeneity on the organizations that joins these projects
hinders the
development of large scale Grid infrastructures. Grid resources
do not only
differ in their hardware but also in their software
configurations (OS, libraries,
and applications). This heterogeneity increases the cost and
length of the
application development cycle, as they have to be tested in a
great variety of
environments where the developers have limited configuration
capabilities.
Therefore, some of the users are only able to use a small
fraction of the Grid.
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.
The proposed approach consists in encapsulating a virtual machine
in a grid
job, incorporating the functionality offered by a general purpose
meta-
scheduling system. So, the genuine characteristics of a Grid
infrastructure (i.e.
dynamism, high fault rate, heterogeneity) are naturally
considered in the
proposed solution. This strategy does not require either
additional middleware
to be deployed or execution of VMs in the Computing Elements, as
it is based
on well-tested procedures and standard services. The only
requirement is to
have Worker Nodes running an hypervisor (Xen, UML…). The
presentation also
assesses the suitability of this deployment in the execution of a
high
throughput scientific application, the XMM-Newton Scientific
Analysis System.
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).
Virtual machines (VMs) are a promising technology to overcome
some of the
problems found in current Grids, like heterogeneity, performance
partitioning or
application isolation. This presentation describes how GridWay
can be used for
the management of VMs in Grid infrastructures. The novel approach
provides
end users with a custom environment for the execution of legacy
numerical
codes, without requiring additional grid middleware to be
installed and so
easily deployable within EGEE.
