John-Paul Navarro

TeraGrid's integrated information service

The NSF TeraGrid project has designed and constructed a federated integrated information service (IIS) to serve its capability publishing and discovery needs. This service has also proven helpful in automating TeraGrids operational activities. We describe the requirements that motivated this work; IISs system architecture, information architecture, and information content; processes that IIS currently supports; and how various layers of the system architecture are being used. We also review motivating use cases that have not yet been satisfied by IIS and outline approaches for future work.

GridCopy: Moving Data Fast on the Grid

An important type of communication in grid and distributed computing environments is bulk data transfer. GridFTP has emerged as a de facto standard for secure, reliable, high-performance data transfer across resources on the grid. GridCopy provides a simple GridFTP client interface to users and extensible configuration that can be changed dynamically by administrators to make efficient data movement in the Grid easier for users.

Scalable cluster administration - Chiba City I approach and lessons learned

Systems administrators of large clusters often need to perform the same administrative task hundreds or thousands of times. Administrators have traditionally performed some time-consuming tasks, such as operating system installation, configuration, and maintenance, manually. By combining network services such as DHCP, TFTP, FTP, HTTP, and NFS with remote hardware control and scripted installation, configuration, and maintenance techniques, cluster administrators can automate these administrative tasks. Scalable cluster administration addresses this challenge: What hardware and software design techniques can cluster builders use to automate cluster administration on very large clusters? We describe the approach used in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory on Chiba City I, a 314-node Linux cluster; and we analyze the scalability, flexibility, performance and reliability benefits and limitations from that approach.

Enabling community access to TeraGrid visualization resources

Visualization is an important part of the data analysis process. Many researchers, however, do not have access to the resources required to do visualization effectively for large datasets. This problem is illustrated through several user scenarios. To remedy this problem, we propose a Visualization Gateway that provides simplified access to such resources to a broad population of users. The current implementation of this gateway is described, including the technology used and the services made available. In particular, a detailed description of a ParaView portlet is included. A proposed design for enabling access to community users is discussed. Technology as well as policy issues that were raised, including security and data management, are covered, as are methods for providing additional services, scaling to include additional resources, and other areas of future development. The paper concludes with a summary of the topics covered. Copyright

Publishing and consuming GLUE v2.0 resource information in XSEDE

XSEDE users, science gateways, and services need a variety of accurate information about XSEDE resources so that they can use those resources effectively. They need information to decide which resources to use, to track their usage of resources, and to provide services to their users. To support this, XSEDE is deploying a new system to gather and publish static and dynamic resource information. This paper gives an overview of the resource information available with this new system, describes the design and performance of the software and services that make up this system, and finally provides examples of how to use this new resource information.

The Problem Solving Environments of TeraGrid, Science Gateways, and the Intersection of the Two

Problem solving environments (PSEs) are increasingly important for scientific discovery. Todays most challenging problems often require multi-disciplinary teams, the ability to analyze very large amounts of data, and the need to rely on infrastructure built by others rather than reinventing solutions for each science team. The TeraGrid Science Gateways program recognizes these challenges and works with science teams to harness high-end resources that significantly extend a PSEs functionality.

Enabling community access to TeraGrid visualization resources: Research Articles

Web portals are one of the possible ways to access the remote computing resources offered by Grid environments. Since the emergence of the first middleware for the Grid, works have been conducted on delivering the functionality of Grid services on the Web. Many interesting Grid portal solutions have been designed help organize remote access to Grid resources and applications from within Web browsers. They are technically advanced and more and more widely used around the world, resulting in feedback from the community. Some of these user comments concern the flexibility and user-friendliness of the developed solutions. In this paper we present how we addressed the need for a flexible and user-friendly Grid portal environment within the PROGRESS project and how our approach facilitates the use of the Grid within Web portals. Copyright