Providing dynamic virtualized access to grid resources via the Web 2.0 paradigm
Date
2007Author
Clementi, Luca
Ding, Zhaohui
Krishnan, Sriram
Wei, Xiaohui
Arzberger, Peter
Li, Wilfred
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Show full item recordAbstract
Grid systems provide mechanisms for single sign-on, and uniform
APIs for job submission and data transfer, in order to allow the
coupling of distributed resources in a seamless manner. However,
new users face a daunting barrier of entry due to the high cost of
deployment and maintenance. They are often required to learn
complex concepts relative to grid infrastructures (credential
management, scheduling systems, data staging, etc). To most
scientific users, running their applications with minimal changes
and yet getting results faster is highly desirable, without having to
know much about how the resources are used. Hence, a higher
level of abstraction must be provided for the underlying
infrastructure to be used effectively. For this purpose, as part of
our prior work, we have developed the Opal toolkit for exposing
applications on grid resources as simple Web services [1]. Opal
provides a basic set of APIs that allows users to execute their
deployed applications through graphical user interfaces, or via
programmatic means.
In this paper, we present our ongoing work to extend the Opal
toolkit that enables the creation of an end-to-end infrastructure to
dynamically leverage scientific applications on grid resources. In
particular, we focus on the following two key extensions. We
have developed a command-line syntax description language that
can be published via the Opal interface. This enables the creation
of dynamic Web forms for job submission, and may even be used
for creating familiar application-specific user interfaces in other
types of Problem Solving Environments (PSE). Additionally, we
have extended the Community Scheduler Framework (CSF4)
Meta-scheduler to support the concept of applications as first class
resources. This enables Opal to submit jobs to different grid
resources where an application is deployed without affecting how
user applications interact with Opal. We believe that these
extensions enable the Opal toolkit to effectively leverage multiple
grid resources, and provide access to the users in a transparent
Web 2.0 fashion.
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