Krzysztof Benedyczak

GridBeans: Support e-Science and Grid Applications

Large-scale scientific research often relies on the collaborative use of Grid and e-Science infrastructures that provide computational or storage related resources. One of the ideas of these modern infrastructures is to facilitate the routine interaction of scientists and their workflows with advanced problem solving tools and computational resources. While many production Grid projects and e-Science infrastructures have begun to offer services for the usage of resources to end-users during the past several years, the corresponding emerging standards defined by GGF and OASIS still appear to be in flux. In this paper, we present the GridBean technology that bridges the gap between the constantly changing basic Grid or e-Science infrastructures and the need of stable application development environments for the Grid users.

Key aspects of the UNICORE 6 security model

This paper presents the security architecture of the sixth version of the UNICORE grid middleware. The sixth iteration of UNICORE introduced a number of new, security-related solutions which make UNICORE distinguishable from the other grid middleware as Globus, gLite or NorduGrid ARC, and these are presented in this paper. The paper discusses the low level security: users authentication, non-repudiation control and trust delegation. The UNICORE unique approach to the challenge of trust delegation is called explicit trust delegation (ETD); discussion of this constitutes the most significant and extensive part of this paper. ETD is compared with the popular grid security infrastructure (GSI). High level security services (such as authorization services) are not described in this paper.

Web Services Interfaces and Open Standards Integration into the European UNICORE 6 Grid Middleware

The UNICORE grid system provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access to distributed grid resources. In recent years, UNICORE 5 is used as a well-tested grid middleware system in production grids (e.g. DEISA, D-Grid) and at many supercomputer centers world-wide. Beyond this production usage, UNICORE serves as a solid basis in many European and International research projects and business scenarios from T-Systems, Philips Research, Intel, Fujitsu and others. To foster ongoing developments in multiple projects, UNICORE is open source under BSD license at SourceForge. More recently, the new Web services-based UNICORE 6 has become available that is based on open standards such as the Web services addressing (WS-A) and the Web services resource framework (WS-RF) and thus conforms to the open grid services architecture (OGSA) of the open grid forum (OGF). In this paper we present the evolution from production UNICORE 5 to the open standards-based UNICORE 6 and its various Web services-based interfaces. It describes the interface integration of emerging open standards such as OGSA-BES and OGSA-RUS and thus provides an overview of UNICORE 6.

Unigrids streaming framework: enabling streaming for the new generation of grids

We present a new infrastructure for high performance streaming in OGSA/WSRF compliant grid. The UniGrids Streaming Framework (UGSF) works with UnicoreGS as WSRF hosting environment. The paper discusses the advantages of mixed SOAP based control with highly efficient streaming. The UGSF components, streaming server and WSRF web service are described along with a detailed performance analysis including comparison to standard solutions. Some applications based on the UGSF are also presented.

Uniform access to the distributed resources for the computational chemistry using UNICORE

In this paper we describe deployment of qunatum chemical and biomolecular applications on the grid. We have used UNICORE infrastructure as framework for development dedicated user interface to the number of existing computational chemistry codes as well as molecular bilogy databases. The user interface is integrated with the UNICORE client based on plugin mechanism which provides general grid functionality such as single login, job submission and control mechanism.

Interactive Visualization for the UNICORE Grid Environment

A description of interactive visualization plugins for the UNICORE grid system is provided. The plugins allows for attaching to running UNICORE jobs, downloading current state of computation and visualization of the results. The plugin set contains a general purpose 2D visualization system Sapphire and an example plugin MolDyAna for 3D visualization of the progress of molecular dynamics jobs. The Sapphire subsystem contains user configurable tools for simple plots of different types and 2D data plotting tools, together with an extensive GUI. MolDyAna provides both standard methods of animation and graphing and several advanced postprocessing and visualization techniques

Enabling Reconfigurable Hardware Accelerators for the Grid

In this paper we describe developed hardware/software composition enabling field programmable logic devices (FPGAs) in the UNICORE grid environment. A Smith-Waterman algorithm for aminoacid and DNA sequences is implemented in FPGA PCI extension card, interfaced with Linux workstation running kernel 2.6 series through special low level module and is exposed to the final user with the UNICORE middleware. This approach gives remote, secure, uniform and easy to use graphical access to the very specialised hardware accelerated service. Additionally, great flexibility to the UNIX system is provided due to separation of a different hardware and software levels using UNICORE plugins. The approach is very effective in a BioGrid context, where we are interested in integration of sophisticate accelerated distributed computational resources and providing general grid functionality consisting of single login, job submission and control mechanism to the life sciences community

Real-Time visualization in the grid using UNICORE middleware

This paper presents real-time data streaming and client side visualization which was developed using UNICORE middleware. Described here IVis system extends UNICORE capabilities and allows for streaming of the data produced by the running simulations. IVis client provides user with advanced tools for data visualization and analysis. The developed software can be also used for remote steering and control. The important feature of the developed solution is utilization of the UNICORE security infrastructure which allows for data streaming without opening new holes in the firewall. The performance of the IVis system has been measured and is presented. We have found that bandwith is mostly limited by the network speed. Performed tests conformed that developed tools can be efficiently used for data streaming and on-line visualization and streaming on the grid.

UNICORE virtual organizations system

In this paper we present a novel Virtual Organizations management system called UVOS, developed within the Chemomentum project. It is a complete and production ready solution aiming at simplicity of deployment and management without sacrificing a flexibility and functionality. The system can be also used as an underlying technology for more high level solutions. The system was designed mainly for the UNICORE grid middleware but, as it uses the open SAML protocol and implements numerous SAML profiles, its adoption for other grid middlewares is straightforward. The paper compares the UVOS system to the other existing and popular solutions: VOMS and Shibboleth used with GridShib.

Distributed collaborative visualization on mobile devices using interactive video streaming techniques

Remote visualization using mobile devices has been a challenge for distributed systems for a long time. Large datasets, usually distributed on different servers require high network bandwidth and significant computational power for effective, real time rendering. The problem is getting more complex when data are visualized in collaborative environment, where every user can interactively participate in rendering session. n nIn this paper we present a distributed system we have developed for the interactive visualization of remote datasets on variety of mobile devices such as laptops, tablets and cell phones. In our system mobile users can join sessions, where they can collaborate over remote data in real time. Every user can watch presentation or can become presenter. If needed, users can individually manipulate the data without affecting rest of participants. n nDuring these sessions all the data are generated on dedicated rendering servers, compressed on-the-fly by the encoding machines using video codec and progressively sent to participants as video streams. Every video stream is dynamically adapted to individual capabilities of users devices and their network bandwidth. Our system works in a distributed environment, where every machine serve different functionality, like data storage, frames rendering or video compression. Successive parts of processed data are streamed between different servers in real time to achieve highly interactive visualization with minor latency. Based on this model we took off most of the computational power from clients application so it can be run on almost any kind of modern mobile device. We were also able to achieve very high video quality and frame rates. System can work with 2D, 3D and even animated 3D data, all of them being processed remotely in real time. At the end of this paper we present some preliminary results of performance test we have obtained using sample multidimensional datasets.