Adrián Santos

Lightweight web services for high performace computing

Web Services-based technologies have emerged as a technological alternative for computational web portals. Facilitating access to distributed resources through web interfaces while simultaneously ensuring security is one of the main goals in most of the currently existing manifold tools and frameworks. OpenCF, the Open Source Computational Framework that we have developed, shares these objectives and adds others, like enforced portability, genericity, modularity and compatibility with a wide range of High Performance Computing Systems. OpenCF has been implemented using lightweight technologies (Apache + PHP), resulting in a robust framework ready to run out of the box that is compatible with standard security requirements.

IDEWEP: Web service for astronomical parallel image deconvolution

Image restoration is a significant process commonly applied in many research fields. In particular, image deconvolution algorithms play a very important role in the research methodology in astrophysics, where recorded images are frequently submitted to deconvolution processes. In this paper, we introduce a novel image deconvolution algorithm that is competitive in terms of the restored image quality when compared to classical approaches. We present parallelizations of this algorithm to make it competitive in terms of processing speeds as well. We also present the image deconvolution web portal (IDEWEP) that, using web services technologies, primarily aims to make this general parallel deconvolution method accessible through a web interface. Both the quality of the restored images and running times of the sequential and parallel version have been successfully tested in several sequential and parallel architectures. The IDEWEP portal greatly eases the access and use of the parallel algorithm in high performance architectures. As a contribution to the scientific community, open source sequential and parallel codes are provided and can be freely downloaded from our web portal.

Web services based scheduling in OpenCF

Cloud Computing is emerging as a new computing paradigm which aims to provide reliable, customized and QoS guaranteed dynamic computing environments for end users. The availability of these large, virtualized pools of computing resources raises the possibility of a new computing paradigm for scientific research with many advantages. For research groups, Cloud Computing provides convenient access to reliable, high-performance clusters and storage without the need to purchase and maintain sophisticated hardware. For developers, virtualization allows scientific codes to be optimized and pre-installed on machine images, facilitating control over the computational environment. In these large-scale, heterogeneous and dynamic systems, the efficient execution of parallel computations can require mappings of tasks to computing resources whose performance is both irregular (because of heterogeneity) and variable in time (because of dynamicity). This paper introduces our initial experience with Cloud Computing based on a Python implementation of our OpenCF framework. We propose to show the features provided by OpenCF using the Google Application Engine as a proof of concept.

The openCF: an open source computational framework based on web services technologies

Web Services-based technologies have emerged as a technological alternative for computational web portals. Facilitating access to distributed resources through web interfaces while simultaneously ensuring security is one of the main goals in most of the currently existing manifold tools and frameworks. OpenCF, the Open Source Computational Framework that we have developed, shares these objectives and adds others, like enforced portability, generality, modularity and compatibility with a wide range of High Performance Computing Systems. OpenCF has been implemented using lightweight technologies (Apache + PHP), resulting in a robust framework ready to run out of the box that is compatible with standard security requirements.

Parallelization of GSL: the Web service interface

We present our joint effort to develop a Web based interface for the GNU Scientific library and its parallelization. The interface has been developed using standard Web services technology to enable the use of non local resources to execute parallel programs. The final result is a computing service where sequential and parallel routines demanding high performance computing are supplied. The design allows to incorporate new servers and platforms with a small number of software requirements.

Exposing Metaheuristics as Web Services in Distributed Systems using OpenCF

Web Services (WS) have emerged as an industry standard attracting the attention of the scientific community as technological alternative for implementing computational portals. Using the OpenCF computational framework, we develop the p-hub Web Service Portal (p-HubWSP) to provide a platform with capabilities for the efficient execution of metaheuristics for p-hub problems through the Internet. The technology used eases the implementation of a web-accessed computing system. The p-HubWSP portal greatly eases the access and use of sequential and parallel codes and platforms.

Using Web Services for Performance Monitoring and Scheduling

The adoption of Web Service standards provides us with an increased level of manageability, extensibility and interoperability between loosely coupled services.The adoption of Web Services technologies atop sites for performance monitoring and scheduling will improve the efficient use of the computational resources. Web Services provide the ability to decompose HPC resources and functionality into a set of discoverable and loosely coupled services, which are capable of interaction in heterogeneous environments. At the same time, Web Services can address many of the interoperability issues that can be encountered in large scale systems.End users can access to these services to decide which system will be the most suitable for their needs. Other tools like schedulers can use the resources available as services to optimize the HPC resources and minimize jobs waiting time.

An open source web service based platform for heterogeneous clusters

We present our joint effort to develop a web based interface for the GNU Scientific library and its parallelization. The interface has been developed using standard web services technology to enable the use of non local resources to execute parallel programs. The final result is a computing service where sequential and parallel routines demanding high performace computing are supplied. The design allows to incorporate new servers and platforms with a small number of software requirements. We also introduce an open source development environment to allow developers to cooperate in the parallelization of the GNU Scientific library codes. These codes also will be available trough the web based interface to end users. Performance results are shown for some GSL codes in two cluster heterogeneous systems using the interface enabled with web services technology.

PETransWS: Web Service Computing Platform for Logistics and Transportation

In large organizations and small firms in transportation, there is a growing need to use and analyze spatial data. Transportation system analysis and planning as well as mobility studies frequently use Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In this paper we propose the development of a web services platform dedicated to transportation and logistics. Taking advantage of the web services development framework PyOpenCF we integrate in the same environment services oriented to geolocalization, logistical optimization, etc. We develop a PyOpenCF client whose graphic interface allows processes with spatial data to be launched and provides a visualization of the results.

Towards the Automatic Service Generation and Scheduling in the OpenCF Project

Web services-based technologies have emerged as a technological alternative for computational web portals. Facilitating access to distributed resources through web interfaces while simultaneously ensuring security is one of the main goals in most of the currently existing manifold tools and frameworks. OpenCF, the open source computational framework that we have developed, shares these objectives and adds others, like enforced portability, genericity, modularity and compatibility with a wide range of high performance computing systems.