M. Shahbaz Memon

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.

Using SAML-based VOMS for authorization within web services-based UNICORE grids

In recent years, the Virtual Organization Membership Service (VOMS) emerged within Grid infrastructures providing dynamic, fine-grained, access control needed to enable resource sharing across Virtual Organization (VOs). VOMS allows to manage authorization information in a VO scope to enforce agreements established between VOs and resource owners. VOMS is used for authorization in the EGEE and OSG infrastructures and is a core component of the respective middleware stacks gLite and VDT. While a module for supporting VOMS is also available as part of the authorization service of the Globus Toolkit, there is currently no support for VO-level authorization within the new Web services-based UNICORE 6. This paper describes the evolution of VOMS towards an open standard compliant service based on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), which in turn provides mechanisms to fill the VO-level authorization service gap within Web service-based UNICORE Grids. In addition, the SAML-based VOMS allows for cross middleware VO management through open standards.

Advancements of the UltraScan scientific gateway for open standards-based cyberinfrastructures

The UltraScan data analysis application is a software package that is able to take advantage of computational resources in order to support the interpretation of analytical ultracentrifugation experiments. Since 2006, the UltraScan scientific gateway has been used with Web browsers in TeraGrid by scientists studying the solution properties of biological and synthetic molecules. UltraScan supports its users with a scientific gateway in order to leverage the power of supercomputing. In this contribution, we will focus on several advancements of the UltraScan scientific gateway architecture with a standardized job management while retaining its lightweight design and end user interaction experience. This paper also presents insights into a production deployment of UltraScan in Europe. The approach is based on open standards with respect to job management and submissions to the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment in the USA and to similar infrastructures in Europe such as the European Grid Infrastructure or the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE). Our implementation takes advantage of the Apache Airavata framework for scientific gateways that lays the foundation for easy integration into several other scientific gateways. Copyright

Improvements of the UltraScan scientific gateway to enable computational jobs on large-scale and open-standards based cyberinfrastructures

The UltraScan data analysis application is a software package that is able to take advantage of computational resources in order to support the interpretation of analytical ultracentrifugation (AUC) experiments. Since 2006, the UltraScan scientific gateway has been used with ordinary Web browsers in TeraGrid by scientists studying the solution properties of biological and synthetic molecules. Unlike other applications, UltraScan is implemented on a gateway architecture and leverages the power of supercomputing to extract very high resolution information from the experimental data. In this contribution, we will focus on several improvements of the UltraScan scientific gateway that enable a standardized job submission and management to computational resources while retaining its lightweight design in order to not disturb the established workflows of its end-users. This paper further presents a walkthrough of the architectural design including one real installation deployment of UltraScan in Europe. The aim is to provide evidence for the added value of open standards and resulting interoperability enabling not only UltraScan application submissions to resources offered in the US cyber infrastructure Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), but also submissions to similar infrastructures in Europe and around the world. The use of the Apache Airavata framework for scientific gateways within our approach bears the potential to have an impact on several other scientific gateways too.

Overview of XSEDE-PRACE collaborative projects in 2014

In this paper we give a brief overview of the three projects that were chosen for XSEDE-PRACE collaboration in 2014. We begin this paper with an introduction of the XSEDE and PRACE organizations and the motivation for a collaborative effort between these two organizations. We then talk about the three projects that were involved in this collaboration. We provide an overview of the projects themselves and what was in scope for this collaboration. We also outline the hurdles and issues faced during this unique collaborative effort and also discuss the benefits the projects derived from this collaboration. We finally outline the future steps envisioned for XSEDE-PRACE collaborative efforts going forward.

Enhanced Resource Management Enabling Standard Parameter Sweep Jobs for Scientific Applications

Parameter sweeps are used by researchers with scientific domain-specific tools or workflows to submit a large collection of computational jobs whereby each single job of it only varies in certain parts. They require a more fine-grained distribution of jobs across resources, which also raise a significant challenge for efficient resource management in middleware environments that have been not specifically designed to perform parameter sweeps. This paper offers insights into parameter sweep solutions that support multi-disciplinary science environments via abstraction from resource management complexities using middleware. The solutions are based on use case requirements, enable efficient submission, enhanced usability, and standard compliance. We also apply a use case taken from the life science domain to demonstrate usefulness and efficiency of the solutions.

Benchmarking of Integrated OGSA-BES with the Grid Middleware

This paper evaluates the performance of the emerging OGF standard OGSA - Basic Execution Service (BES) on three fundamentally different Grid middleware platforms: UNICORE 5/6, Globus Toolkit 4 and gLite. The particular focus within this paper is on the OGSA-BES implementation of UNICORE 6. A comparison is made with baseline measurements, for UNICORE 6 and Globus Toolkit 4, using the legacy job submission interfaces. Our results show that the BES components are comparable in performance to existing legacy interfaces. We also have a strong indication that other factors, attributable to the supporting infrastructure, have a bigger impact on performance than BES components.

Enabling Grid Interoperability by Extending HPC-driven Job Management with an Open Standard Information Model

Many e-science applications take already advantage of numerous e-science infrastructures that evolved differently over the last couple of years. Along with this evolution, we observe still slow adoption of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) concept and thus interoperability between these infrastructures is still not seamlessly provided today. We argue that this is due to the absence of a realistically implementable reference model in Grids. In this contribution, we present our approach as one element of this reference model that focuses on the missing link between two emerging standards in the field of job management and information models in order to facilitate common open standards-based Grid interoperability.

Facilitating efficient data analysis of remotely sensed images using standards-based parameter sweep models

Classification of remote sensing images often use Support Vector Machines (SVMs) that require an n-fold cross-validation phase in order to do model selection. This phase is characterized by sweeping through a wide set of parameter combinations of SVM kernel and cost parameters. As a consequence this process is computationally expensive but represents a principled way of tuning a model for better accuracy and to prevent overfitting together with regularization that is in SVMs inherently solved in the optimization. Since the cross-validation technique is done in a principled way also known as ‘gridsearch’, we aim at supporting remote sensing scientists in two ways. Firstly by reducing the time-to-solution of the cross-validation by applying state-of-the-art parallel processing methods because the sweep of parameters and cross-validation runs itself can be nicely parallelized. Secondly by reducing manual labour by automating the parallel submission processes since manually performing cross-validation is very time consuming, unintuitive, and error-prone especially in large-scale cluster or supercomputing environments (e.g., batch job scripts, node/core/task parameters, etc.).

Interoperable job execution and data access through UNICORE and the Global Federated File System

Computing middlewares play a vital role for abstracting complexities of backend resources by providing a seamless access to heterogeneous execution management services. Scientific communities are taking advantage of such technologies to focus on science rather than dealing with technical intricacies of accessing resources. Multi-disciplinary communities often bring dynamic requirements which are not trivial to realize. Specifically, to attain massivley parallel data processing on supercomputing resources which require an access to large data sets from widely distributed and dynamic sources located across organizational boundaries. In order to support this abstract scenario, we bring a combination that integrates UNICORE middleware and the Global Federated File System. Furthermore, the paper gives architectural and implementation perspective of UNICORE extension and its interaction with Global Federated File System space through computing, data and security standards.