Scalable Services Success Stories
From CEDPS
Contents |
CEDPS success with caBIG and APS beamline
Under the leadership of Ravi Madduri, member of the SciDAC CEDPS project, Argonne software developers have designed and implemented several innovative technologies in the caBIG architecture and have developed a collaborative information network to enable interoperability among biomedial databases and analytical tools.
The tool called gRAVI (grid remote application virtualization interface, pronounced "gravy") along with Introduce toolkit (part of the caGrid toolkit) provides a framework to enable fast and easy creation of Globus based grid services (while hiding all "grid-ness" from the developer). It addresses service support features such as: advertisement, discovery, invocation, and security (Authentication/Authorization. It allows researchers to wrap executables, applications as Grid services without writing a single line of code and thus reducing barrier to entry for researchers to expose their applications as services promoting reuse.
The caBIG initiative is a four-year project, funded by the National Cancer Institute, with the mission of linking the more than 60 cancer centers across the U.S. into an integrated distributed-computing system. There are over 900 caBIG participants accessing 45 different services through caGRID.
The new infrastructure for caBIG, called caGrid, uses gRAVI for creating, registering, discovering, and invoking analytical routines as Grid services. Authorized researchers nationwide can invoke these services and compose multiple services into workflows for individual applications. The infrastructure also allows one to create a common gateway service between the caGrid and the TeraGrid, which integrates high-performance computers, data storage, and high-end experimental facilities around the country. This new gateway service, bridges caGrid authentication and authorization processes to the TeraGrid security services, so users can easily access the resources of the TeraGrid without having to modify their applications.
The toolset is finding fame in application areas outside of SciDAC, from the caBIG cancer researchers, who have given several awards to the Argonne project team, to experimental researchers like Brian Tieman of the Advanced Photon Source.
At a recent workshop on lightweight tools for collaborative science, Tieman reported that use of gRAVI has shortened his development time for new services from over a month to around two days. Tieman is generating services that control a beamline experiment, and the data analysis, visualization and modeling that follow on. In addition to the shorter development time, Tieman says gRAVI provides security for jobs, and tracks when his remote job finishes, “and science just happens”.
Argonne Cloud Computing Helps CERN Scientists
Article on HPC Wire:
"A novel system is enabling high energy physicists at CERN in Switzerland, to make production runs that integrate their existing pool of distributed computers with dynamic resources in "science clouds." The work was presented at the 17th annual conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, held in Prague, Czech Republic, March 21-27.
The integration was achieved by leveraging two mechanisms: the Nimbus Context Broker, developed by computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, and a portable software environment developed at CERN."
Read more at: http://www.hpcwire.com/topic/middleware/Argonne-Cloud-Computing-Helps-CERN-Scientists-41770632.html?viewAll=y
Nimbus and Cloud Computing Meet STAR Production Demands
Article from HPC Wire:
"The advantages of cloud computing were dramatically illustrated last week by researchers working on the STAR nuclear physics experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. New simulation results were needed for presentation at the Quark Matter physics conference; but all the computational resources were either committed to other tasks or did not support the environment needed for STAR computations. Fortunately, working with technology developed by the Nimbus team at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, the STAR researchers were able to dynamically provision virtual clusters on commercial cloud computers and run the additional computations just in time.
Nimbus is an open source cloud computing infrastructure that provides tools allowing users to deploy virtual machines on resources, similar to Amazon's EC2, as well as user-level tools such as the Nimbus Context Broker that combines several deployed virtual machines into "turnkey" virtual clusters."
Read more at: http://www.hpcwire.com/topic/systems/Nimbus-and-Cloud-Computing-Meet-STAR-Production-Demands-42354742.html?viewAll=y
APS Running Remote Applications Easier
The CEDPS-funded Remote Application Virtualization Infrastructure (RAVi) project, lead by Argonne researcher R. Madduri, is working with the APS to allow them to run applications over the TeraGrid resources without the end user having to write a single line of code. RAVi provides GUI-based tools to guide the user through the process of identifying an application, mapping from strongly typed Web Services operations to application arguments, defining authentication and authorization requirements, and deploying a service onto an execution site. It uses Globus job submissions tools, including GRAM, to remotely execute an application.
