Zoltan Farkas

WS-PGRADE/gUSE Generic DCI Gateway Framework for a Large Variety of User Communities

The WS-PGRADE/gUSE generic DCI gateway framework has been developed to support a large variety of user communities. It provides a generic purpose, workflow-oriented graphical user interface to create and run workflows on various DCIs including clusters, Grids, desktop Grids and clouds. The framework can be used by NGIs to support small user communities who cannot afford to develop their own customized science gateway. The WS-PGRADE/gUSE framework also provides two API interfaces (Application Specific Module API and Remote API) to create application-specific science gateways according to the needs of different user communities. The paper describes in detail the workflow concept of WS-PGRADE, the DCI Bridge service that enables access to most of the popular European DCIs and the Application Specific Module and Remote API concepts to generate application-specific science gateways.

EDGeS: Bridging EGEE to BOINC and XtremWeb

Desktop Grids, such as XtremWeb and BOINC, and Service Grids, such as EGEE, are two different approaches for science communities to gather computing power from a large number of computing resources. Nevertheless, little work has been done to combine these two Grid technologies in order to establish a seamless and vast Grid resource pool. In this paper we present the EGEE Service Grid, the BOINC and XtremWeb Desktop Grids. Then, we present the EDGeS solution to bridge the EGEE Service Grid with the BOINC and XtremWeb Desktop Grids.

The Genomic Landscape of Compensatory Evolution

The Genomic Landscape of Compensatory Evolution Laboratory selection experiment explains how organisms compensate for the loss of genes during evolution, and reveals the deleterious side-effects of this process when adapting to novel environments.

High-level grid application environment to use legacy codes as OGSA grid services

One of the biggest obstacles in the wide-spread industrial take-up of grid technology is the existence of a large amount of legacy code that is not accessible as grid services. The paper describes a new approach (GEMLCA: grid execution management for legacy code architecture) to deploy legacy codes as grid services without modifying the original code. Moreover, we show a workflow execution oriented grid portal technology (P-GRADE portal) by which such legacy code based grid services can be applied in complex business processes. GEMLCA has been implemented as GT-3 services but can be easily ported into the new WSRF grid standards.

P-GRADE Portal: A generic workflow system to support user communities

P-GRADE portal is an open-source multi-grid portal that supports creation, execution and management of traditional and parameter study workflows on gLite and GT-2 infrastructures. However, some user communities need support for other grid types, like desktop grids or the Amazon EC2 cloud, as well. In this paper we will present the internal architecture of P-GRADE Portal as well as the implementation details of grid support methods. This paper intends to give support for those communities who would like to further develop the portal or create a similar one for other workflow systems.

A Secure Grid Medical Data Manager Interfaced to the gLite Middleware

The medical community is producing and manipulating a tremendous volume of digital data for which computerized archiving, processing and analysis is needed. Grid infrastructures are promising for dealing with challenges arising in computerized medicine but the manipulation of medical data on such infrastructures faces both the problem of interconnecting medical information systems to Grid middlewares and of preserving patients’ privacy in a wide and distributed multi-user system. These constraints are often limiting the use of Grids for manipulating sensitive medical data. This paper describes our design of a medical data management system taking advantage of the advanced gLite data management services, developed in the context of the EGEE project, to fulfill the stringent needs of the medical community. It ensures medical data protection through strict data access control, anonymization and encryption. The multi-level access control provides the flexibility needed for implementing complex medical use-cases. Data anonymization prevents the exposure of most sensitive data to unauthorized users, and data encryption guarantees data protection even when it is stored at remote sites. Moreover, the developed prototype provides a Grid storage resource manager (SRM) interface to standard medical DICOM servers thereby enabling transparent access to medical data without interfering with medical practice.

SZTAKI Desktop Grid (SZDG): A Flexible and Scalable Desktop Grid System

SZTAKI Desktop Grid (SZDG) is an extension of BOINC in order to make it more flexible, versatile and scalable in terms of enabling the interconnection of different BOINC projects and execution of parameter sweep applications from a generic, high level user interface without the intervention of the BOINC project administrator. The paper describes the main concepts and features of SZDG. Among the many novel features the two most important will be described in detail. First, the paper describes those extensions that enable the easy development and execution of parameter sweep applications on SZDGs. The second part of the paper describes how SZDGs can be organized into a hierarchical interconnection scheme that enables to use SZDGs as building blocks to create higher level SZDGs.

Enabling scientific workflow sharing through coarse-grained interoperability

E-scientists want to run their scientific experiments on Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI) to be able to access large pools of resources and services. To run experiments on these infrastructures requires specific expertise that e-scientists may not have. Workflows can hide resources and services as a virtualization layer providing a user interface that e-scientists can use. There are many workflow systems used by research communities but they are not interoperable. To learn a workflow system and create workflows in this workflow system may require significant efforts from e-scientists. Considering these efforts it is not reasonable to expect that research communities will learn new workflow systems if they want to run workflows developed in other workflow systems. The solution is to create workflow interoperability solutions to allow workflow sharing. The FP7 Sharing Interoperable Workflow for Large-Scale Scientific Simulation on Available DCIs (SHIWA) project developed two interoperability solutions to support workflow sharing: Coarse-Grained Interoperability (CGI) and Fine-Grained Interoperability (FGI). The project created the SHIWA Simulation Platform (SSP) to implement the Coarse-Grained Interoperability approach as a production-level service for research communities. The paper describes the CGI approach and how it enables sharing and combining existing workflows into complex applications and run them on Distributed Computing Infrastructures. The paper also outlines the architecture, components and usage scenarios of the simulation platform.

BUILDING SCIENCE GATEWAYS BY UTILIZING THE GENERIC WS-PGRADE/GUSE WORKFLOW SYSTEM

Enabling scientists to use remote distributed infrastructures, parametrizeand execute common science-domain applications transparently is actual anda highly relevant field of distributed computing. For this purpose a general so-lution is the concept of Science Gateways. WS-PGRADE/gUSE system offersa transparent and web-based interface to access distributed resources (grids,clusters or clouds), extended by a powerful generic purpose workflow editorand enactment system, which can be used to compose scientific applicationsinto data-flow based workflow structures. It’s a generic web-based portal so-lution to organize scientific applications in a workflow structure and executethem on remote computational resources. As the portal defines nodes as black-box applications uploaded by the users, it does not provide any applicationspecific interface by default. In this paper we show what kind of tools, APIsand interfaces are available in WS-PGRADE/gUSE to customize it to have anapplication specific gateway.

Interoperability of BOINC and EGEE

Today basically two types of grid systems are in use: service grids and desktop grids. Service grids offer an infrastructure for grid users, thus require notable management to keep the service running. On the other hand, desktop grids aim to utilize free CPU cycles of cheap desktop PCs, are easy to set up, but the availability towards users is limited compared to the service grid. The aim of the EDGeS project is to create an integrated infrastructure that combines the advantages of the two grid concepts. A building block of this infrastructure is bridging between the different grid types. In this paper, we first focus on bridging from BOINC-based desktop grids towards EGEE-like service grids, i.e., making desktop grids able to utilize free service grid resources. The solution is based on a generic grid to grid bridge, called as, 3G Bridge. In the second part of the paper we show how the 3G Bridge and EDGeS Bridge services can be used to realize the reverse direction interconnection of BOINC and EGEE grids, i.e., sending EGEE jobs in a user transparent way to BOINC systems that are connected to EGEE VOs. This is the first paper in which we publish the full two-directional bridging between BOINC and EGEE grids.