Jarek Gawor

A Java commodity grid kit

Developing advanced applications for the emerging national‐scale ‘Computational Grid’ infrastructures is still a difficult task. Although Grid services are available that assist the application developers in authentication, remote access to computers, resource management, and infrastructure discovery, they provide a challenge because these services may not be compatible with the commodity distributed‐computing technologies and frameworks used previously.

State and events for Web services: a comparison of five WS-resource framework and WS-notification implementations

The Web services resource framework defines conventions for managing state in distributed systems based on Web services, and WS-notification defines topic-based publish/subscribe mechanisms. We analyze five independent and quite different implementations of these specifications from the perspectives of architecture, functionality, standards compliance, performance, and interoperability. We identify both commonalities among the different systems (e.g., similar dispatching and SOAP processing mechanisms) and differences (e.g., security, programming models, and performance). Our results provide insights into effective implementation approaches. Our results may also provide application developers, system architects, and deployers with guidance in identifying the right implementation for their requirements and in determining how best to use that implementation and what to expect with regard to performance and interoperability.

Designing Grid-based problem solving environments and portals

Building problem solving environments in the emerging national-scale Computational Grid infrastructure is a challenging task. Accessing advanced Grid services, such as authentication, remote access to computers, resource management, and directory services, is usually not a simple matter for problem solving environment developers. The Commodity Grid project is working to overcome this difficulty by creating what we call Commodity Grid Toolkits (CoG Kits) that define mappings and interfaces between the Grid and particular commodity frameworks familiar to problem solving environment developers. We explain why CoG Kits are important for problem solving environment developers, describe the design and implementation of a Java CoG Kit, and use examples to illustrate how CoG Kits can enable new approaches to application development based on the integrated use of commodity and Grid technologies.

HAND: Highly Available Dynamic Deployment Infrastructure for Globus Toolkit 4

Grid computing is becoming more and more attractive for coordinating large-scale heterogeneous resource sharing and problem solving. Of particular interest for effective grid computing is a software provisioning mechanism. We propose a highly available dynamic deployment infrastructure, HAND, based on the Java Web services core of Globus toolkit 4. HAND provides capability, availability, and extensibility for dynamic deployment of Java Web services in dynamic grid environments. We identify the factors that have impact to dynamic deployment in static and dynamic environments. We also present the design, analysis, implementation, and evaluation of two different approaches to dynamic deployment (service level and container level), and examine the performance of alternative data transfer protocol for service implementations. Our results demonstrate that HAND can deliver significantly improved availability and performance relative to other approaches

A CORBA Commodity Grid Kit

This paper reports on an ongoing research project aimed at designing and deploying a Common Object Resource Broker Architecture (CORBA) (ww.omg.org) Commodity Grid (CoG) Kit. The overall goal of this project is to enable the development of advanced Grid applications while adhering to state‐of‐the‐art software engineering practices and reusing the existing Grid infrastructure. As part of this activity, we are investigating how CORBA can be used to support the development of Grid applications. In this paper, we outline the design of a CORBA CoG Kit that will provide a software development framework for building a CORBA ‘Grid domain’. We also present our experiences in developing a prototype CORBA CoG Kit that supports the development and deployment of CORBA applications on the Grid by providing them access to the Grid services provided by the Globus Toolkit. Copyright

Features of the Java Commodity Grid Kit

In this paper we report on the features of the Java Commodity Grid Kit (Java CoG Kit). The Java CoG Kit provides middleware for accessing Grid functionality from the Java framework. Java CoG Kit middleware is general enough to design a variety of advanced Grid applications with quite different user requirements. Access to the Grid is established via Globus Toolkit protocols, allowing the Java CoG Kit to also communicate with the services distributed as part of the C Globus Toolkit reference implementation. Thus, the Java CoG Kit provides Grid developers with the ability to utilize the Grid, as well as numerous additional libraries and frameworks developed by the Java community to enable network, Internet, enterprise and peer‐to‐peer computing. A variety of projects have successfully used the client libraries of the Java CoG Kit to access Grids driven by the C Globus Toolkit software. In this paper we also report on the efforts to develop serverside Java CoG Kit components. As part of this research we have implemented a prototype pure Java resource management system that enables one to run Grid jobs on platforms on which a Java virtual machine is supported, including Windows NT machines. Copyright

GridMapper: a tool for visualizing the behavior of large-scale distributed systems

Grid applications can combine the use of computation, storage, network, and other resources. These resources are often geographically distributed, adding to application complexity and thus the difficulty of understanding application performance. We present GridMapper, a tool for monitoring and visualizing the behavior of such distributed systems. GridMapper builds on basic mechanisms for registering, discovering, and accessing performance information sources, as well as for mapping from domain names to physical locations. The visualization system itself then supports the automatic layout of distributed sets of such sources and animation of their activities. We use a set of examples to illustrate how the system can provide valuable insights into the behavior and performance of a range of different applications.

InfoGram: a grid service that supports both information queries and job execution

The research described in this paper is performed as part of the Globus Project. It introduces a new grid service called InfoGram that combines the ability of serving as information service and as a job execution service. Previously, both services were architected and implemented within the Globus Toolkit as two different services with different wire protocols. Our service demonstrates a significant simplification of the architecture while treating job submissions and information queries alike. The advantage of our service is that it provides backwards compatibility to existing grid services, while at the same time providing forwards compatibility to the emerging Web services world. Part of the work conducted within this effort is already reused by the current open grid services architecture prototype implementation.

Software, Component, and Service Deployment in Computational Grids

Grids comprise an infrastructure that enables scientists to use a diverse set of distributed remote services and resources as part of complex scientific problem-solving processes. We analyze some of the challenges involved in deploying software and components transparently in Grids. We report on three practical solutions used by the Globus Project. Lessons learned fromthis experience lead us to believe that it is necessary to support a variety of software and component deployment strategies. These strategies are based on the hosting environment.

Provisioning for Dynamic Instantiation of Community Services

On-demand provisioning can allow collaborative communities to rapidly deploy the services required to support collaboration, without the need to acquire and operate dedicated hardware. To meet community needs for on- demand access while also maximizing global availability and runtime efficiency, the authors propose service-, container-, node-, and VO-level provisioning approaches based on a highly available dynamic deployment infrastructure. Their experiments with an image-processing application demonstrate their approachs efficiency and effectiveness.