Grid and Cloud Computing

Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI

Making use of distributed resources for applications or services within a single administrative domain or across multiple domains raises a number of issues to be resolved on the middleware layer. These issues include authentication and authorization, retrieval of resources and services, orchestration of resources, mapping of applications to suitable compute resources, management of licenses for commercial software, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Today some limited or proprietary solutions for these issues exist - usually only supporting local environments. However, grids and Service-oriented Architectures (SoA) as evolving technologies for executing applications or services in both scientific and commercial environments will become a real option only if interoperable, standards based solutions will be available.

Developments

Based on more than eight years of involvement and experience in grid computing our research is focusing on solutions for the problems mentioned above. Moreover, we already have first results ready for evaluation, described under "Solutions" below. We develop our solutions in the context of European projects, the German D-Grid (more Info) and the Open Grid Forum (OGF). Solutions under developments that will become available within the next twelve months are:

  • interoperable authentication and authorization mechanisms (developed in D-Grid)
  • mapping of applications to suitable computer resources (developed in CoreGRID)
  • management of licenses for commercial applications in distributes environments (developed in D-Grid and CoreGRID)
  • negotiation and management of SLAs (developed in the OGF)
  • universal annotation and mapping, used for semantic annotation of web / grid services and data bases.

Currently we are also working on a solution for text mining in the grid, leveraging ProMiner, a product of the department, to be efficiently used in grids. All developments support either the three major grid platforms (Globus Toolkit, gLite and UNICORE) or are independent from the middleware. As we use web-service technologies all developments naturally fit into SoA environments.

Grid integrated resarch:

  • CoreGRID: European »Network of Excellence« aims at strengthening and advancing scientific and technological excellence in the area of grid and peer-to-peer technologies more Info

  • Grid development and testbeds:

    • VO-Management: BMBF funded project creating a framework for VO-Management in D-Grid. more Info
    • IVOM: BMBF funded project providing Interoperability und Integration of VO-Management Technologies in D-Grid. more Info
    • VIOLA: BMBF funded project for the application of new network technologies and forms of network intelligence within a testbed more Info
    • PHOSPHORUS: European funded project addressing some of the key technical challenges to enable on-demand e2e grid network services across multiple domains. more Info

    Biomedical grid applications:

    • SiMDAT: development of basic techniques for grid computing: more Info
    • @neurIST: integrated biomedical informatics for the management of cerebral aneurysms more Info

Solutions

With the MetaScheduling Service (MSS) we currently offer solutions for orchestration of resources, located both in single administrative domains and in multiple domains. The MSS supports advance reservation of resources for complex applications that either need multiple resources at the same time (co-allocation) or with timely dependencies (workflows). The MSS may be used stand-alone. However, we also provide integration into the UNICORE client. Another development that is close to be released for usage in productive environments is TUAM, a Tool for Universal Annotation and Mapping, used for semantic annotation of web / grid services and data bases.