Vania Boccia

Monitoring and Migration of a PETSc-based Parallel Application for Medical Imaging in a Grid computing PSE

In last decades, imaging techniques became central to the diagnostic process providing the medical community with a fast growing amounts of information held in images. This implies developing computational tools which allow a reliable, robust and efficient processing of data and enhanced analysis. Moreover, clinicians may have the need to explore collaborative approaches and to exchange diagnostic information from available data. A medical experiment often involves not a single approach but a set of processings that should be sometimes executed concurrently.

GaaS: customized grids in the clouds

Cloud Computing has been widely adopted as a new paradigm for providing resources because of the advantages it brings to both users and providers. Even if it was firstly targeted at enterprises wishing to reduce their equipment management costs, it has been rapidly recognized as both an enabler for new applications and as a mean to allow enterprises of all sizes at running high demanding applications. Recently, Cloud Providers are trying to attract new applications, such as scientific ones, that today already benefit from distributed environment like Grids. This work presents a way to remove the paradigm mismatch between Cloud and Grid Computing, enabling the use of Cloud-provided resources with well-established Grid-like interfaces, avoiding the need for users to learn new resources access and use models. The proposed approach is validated through the development of a prototype implementation and its integration in a working Grid environment.

Insertion of PETSc in the NEMO stack software driving NEMO towards exascale computing

This paper addresses the scientific challenges related to high level implementation strategies which steer the NEMO (Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean) code toward the effective exploitation of the opportunities offered by exascale systems. We consider, as case studies, two components of the NEMO ocean model (OPA-Ocean PArallelization): the Sea Surface Height equation solver and the Variational Data Assimilation module. The advantages rising from the insertion of consolidated scientific libraries in the NEMO code are highlighted: such advantages concern both the “software quality” improvement (see the software quality parameters like robustness, portability, resilience, etc.) and the reduction of time spent for software development and maintenance. Finally, we consider the Shallow Water equations as a toy model for NEMO ocean model to show how the use of PETSc objects predisposes the application to gain a good level of scalability and efficiency when the most suitable level of abstraction is used.

Toward a Flexible, Environmentally Conscious, on Demand High Performance Computing Service

This work is related with planning and implementation of an on demand computing service which is able to obtain a right trade-off among managment cost reduction, environmental sustainability and user satisfaction.

An Approach to Forecast Queue Time in Adaptive Scheduling: How to Mediate System Efficiency and Users Satisfaction

The minimisation of the total cost of ownership is hard to be faced by the owners of large scale computing systems, without affecting negatively the quality of service for the users. Modern datacenters, often included in distributed environments, appear to be “elastic”, i.e., they are able to shrink or enlarge the number of local physical or virtual resources, also by recruiting them from private/public clouds. This increases the degree of dynamicity, making the infrastructure management more and more complex. Here, we report some advances in the realisation of an adaptive scheduling controller (ASC) which, by interacting with the datacenter resource manager, allows an effective and an efficient usage of resources. In particular, we focus on the mathematical formalisation of the ASC’s kernel that allows to dynamically configure, in a suitable way, the datacenter resources manager. The described formalisation is based on a probabilistic approach that, starting from both a hystorical resources usage and on the actual users request of the datacenter resources, identifies a suitable probability distribution for queue time with the aim to perform a short term forecasting. The case study is the SCoPE datacenter at the University of Naples Federico II.

SCoPE@Scuola: (In)-formative Paths on Topics Related with High Performance, Parallel and Distributed Computing

The SCoPE@Scuola initiative was born with the aim to inspire curiosity in high school students about High Performance Computing (HPC) and Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC). The HPC/PDC world could be an interesting matter for students because is a necessary tool to solve challenging problems in science and technology and it provides context where a plenty of knowledge acquired at school can find a real application. In fact, the themes related to HPC/PDC involve a large range of knowledge and skills: from mathematical modelling of problems to algorithm design, from software implementation to design and management of complex computer systems. The initiative, begun at the end of 2014, involved several schools in the Naples (Italy) district, and has also been used for work-based learning activities and projects aimed to avoid students “dropouts”. The results collected during all the last years make us hopeful that such initiative could be useful both to increment students awareness about the utility in the real world of all the knowledge acquired at school and to help them in their future educational and/or working choices.

On the Implementation of Three Popular Computational Chemistry Applications Using the EGI Distributed Computing Infrastructure

The increasing availability of computer power on Grid platforms has promoted the implementation of complex computational codes on distributed systems, while development of appropriate visual interfaces, tools and portals has minimized the skills necessary to carry out massive Grid calculations. In the present work we analyse the procedures adopted to implement on the Italian Grid Infrastructure (IGI) some computational science codes making use of the IGI web portal. The considered applications of interest for the members of the Chemistry, Molecular and Materials Sciences and Technologies community are VENUS (chemical dynamics for classical trajectory simulations), CRYSTAL (ab initio quantum chemistry for calculations on crystals, slabs and polymers) and Quantum Espresso (electronic structure and materials modeling at the nanoscale).

Computing at SuperB

Domenico Del Prete*, Fabrizio Bianchi, Vania Boccia, Vincenzo Ciaschini, Marco Corvo, Guglielmo De Nardo, Andrea Di Simone, Giacinto Donvito, Armando Fella, Paolo Franchini, Francesco Giacomini, Alberto Gianoli, Giuliano Laccetti, Stefano Longo, Steffen Luitz, Eleonora Luppi, Matteo Manzali, Leonardo Merola, Silvio Pardi, Alejandro Perez, Matteo Rama, Guido Russo, Bruno Santeramo, Roberto Stroili, Luca Tommasetti

The MedIGrid PSE in an LCG/gLite environment

In this paper we are concerned with improvements and enhancements of a medical imaging grid-enabled infrastructure, named MedIGrid, oriented to the transparent use of resource-intensive applications for managing, processing and visualizing biomedical images. We describe an implementation of the MedIGrid PSE in an LCG/gLite environment. Wepsilall mainly focus on how to exploit the features of the new middleware environment to improve the efficiency and the services reliability of the PSE; further, some comments will be devoted to how to modify, extend and/or improve the underlying numerical components.