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
The goal of the Grid2Win project is to port gLite services to
MS-Windows based
platforms to be integrated into the Sicilian grid
e-Infrastructure of TriGrid. Main
services on which we are focusing are the User Interface, to let
also Windows users
access the grid services, and the Computing Element, to add
Windows applications to
the set of the ones already deployed on the infrastructure as
well as to exploit the
large computing power provided by existing Windows clusters.
Currently, we have already ported the gLite User Interface and
developed our first
Grid2Win Graphical UI (Grid2Win GUI) running on Windows desktops.
Further, we have
already built a Torque/MAUI based Computing Element on Windows XP
and published it
into an Information System as a grid resource.
Next steps are the deployment of an entire Windows XP cluster on
our infrastructure
and the integration of a new type of CE built on top of the
Compute Cluster Server
(CCS) local resource manager recently released by Microsoft.
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)
During the process of porting, we encountered many problems in
terms of portability
of the code. There is no a unique way to build packages and
software. For each
package, a different solution has been found and adopted. There
are no documents
describing the source from a developer point of view and we were
obliged to make a
very deep analysis of the code. Moreover, we were obliged to
adjust some portions of
the code to be able to execute on Cygwin POSIX environment.
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.
At the moment, our experience is based on a set of tests we made
to verify the
validity of the system and to evaluate performances. We have just
put in production a
Windows-based site in the GILDA t-Infrastructure. Tests made
executing simple Windows
applications were successfull. We are now preparing a more
complex set of tests to be
done in the next weeks.
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).
Grid2Win is a joint development of the EGEE GILDA Team and the
TriGrid VL Project
(http://www.trigrid.it) funded by the Sicilian Regional Government.
