Fundamentals of Grid Computing

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Fundamentals of Grid Computing

• IBM Redbooks paper
• Viktors Berstis
• Presented by
• Saeed Ghanbari

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What is Grid Computing?

• The term Grid computing originated in the early
  1990s as a metaphor for making computer power as
  easy to access as an electric power grid.
• The definitive definition of a Grid is provided
  by Ian Foster in his article "What is the Grid?
• Computing resources are not administered
  centrally.
• Open standards are used.
• Non-trivial quality of service is achieved.
• Plaszczak/Wellner define Grid technology as "the
  technology that enables resource virtualization,
  on-demand provisioning, and service (resource)
  sharing between organizations."
• IBM "A Grid is a type of parallel and
  distributed system that enables the sharing,
  selection, and aggregation of resources
  distributed across multiple administrative
  domains based on the resources availability,
  capacity, performance, cost and users'
  quality-of-service requirements"

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Topics to be covered

• What grid computing can do
• Grid concepts and components
• Grid construction
• Using a grid
• A users perspective
• An administrators perspective
• An application developers perspective

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What grid computing can do(1)

• Exploiting underutilized resources
• Computing
• Desktop less than 5
• Even servers in many organizations
• Unused disk capacity
• Implications
• without undue overhead.
• remote machine must meet any special hardware,
  software, or resource requirements
• Parallel CPU capacity
• Subjobs on different machines
• Barriers often exist to perfect scalability.

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What grid computing can do(2)

• Applications
• Grid-enabled applications
• no practical tools for transforming arbitrary
  applications to exploit the parallel capabilities
  of a grid.

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What grid computing can do(3)

• Virtual resources and virtual organizations for
  collaboration
• More capable than distributed computing
• Wider audience
• Open standards, hence highly heterogeneous
  systems
• Data, equipment, software, services, licenses,
• Several real and virtual organizations

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What grid computing can do(3)

• Access to additional resources
• special equipment, software, licenses, and other
  services
• Resource balancing

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What grid computing can do(4)

• Reliability
• Now redundancy in hardware
• Future Software
• Utilize autonomic computing

• Management
• More disperse IT infrastructure
• Priority among projects

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Grid concepts and components(1)Types of resources

• Computation
• Storage
• Primary/secondary storage
• Mountable networked filed system
• AFS, NFS, DFS, GPFS
• Capacity increase
• Uniform name space
• Data Stripping

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Grid concepts and components(2)Types of
resources (cont)

• Communications
• Redundant communication paths
• Software and licenses
• License management software
• Special equipment, capacities, architectures, and
  policies
• different architectures, operating systems,
  devices, capacities, and equipment.
• Jobs and applications
• Application is a collection of jobs
• Specific dependencies

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Grid concepts and components(3)Types of
resources (cont)

• Scheduling, reservation, and scavenging
• scheduler
• automatically finds the most appropriate machine
  on which to run any given job
• scavenging
• report its idle status to the grid management
  node.
• SETI_at_home Search for Extraterrestrial
  Intelligence at Home
• Reserved
• dedicated resources

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Grid concepts and components(4)

• Intragrid to Intergrid
• cluster
• same hardware/software
• Intragrid
• heterogeneous machines/software
• multiple department/same organization
• Intergrid
• heterogeneous machines/software
• multiple department/multiple organization

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Grid construction(1)Grid software components

• Management components
• resource accounting
• load sensors
• resource evaluation
• overall usage patterns
• autonomic computing
• Donor software
• each machine needs to enroll as a member of the
  grid and install some software that manages the
  grids use of its resources
• authentication
• monitoring
• check pointing / resuming
• Submission software

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Grid construction(2)Grid software components
(cont.)

• Distributed grid management
• hierarchy of clusters
• Schedulers
• job priority system
• react to immediate load
• monitor the progress of scheduled jobs
  re-submisson
• reservation system
• meta-scheduler
• Communications
• jobs communicate with each other.
• The open standard Message Passing Interface (MPI)

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Using a grid A users perspective(1)

• Enrolling and installing grid software
• authentication for security purposes
• certificate authority
• decide which resources to donate to the grid
• Logging onto the grid
• grid login ID

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Using a grid A users perspective(2)

• Queries and submitting jobs
• staging the input data
• different architectures multiple versions of
  the program
• job execution
• sandbox
• collect results
• Data configuration
• data replication
• networked file system
• caching feature enabled

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Using a grid A users perspective(3)

• Monitoring progress and recovery
• Degree of recovery for subjobs that fail
• Failures
• Programming error
• Hardware or power failure
• Communications interruption
• Excessive slowness
• Recovery
• Scheduler
• User

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Using a grid An administrators perspective(1)

• Planning
• Installation
• Managing enrollment of donors and users
• Certificate authority
• It is critical to ensure the highest levels of
  security in a grid because the grid is designed
  to execute code and not just share data
• Positively identify entities requesting
  certificates
• Issuing, removing, and archiving certificates
• Protecting the certificate authority server
• Maintaining a namespace of unique names for
  certificate owners
• Serve signed certificates to those needing to
  authenticate entities
• Logging activity

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Using a grid An administrators perspective(2)

• Resource management
• setting permissions
• Tracking resource usage
• Implementing a billing system
• policies to achieve better utilization

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Using a grid An application developers
perspective(1)

• Applications that are not enabled for using
  multiple processors but can be executed on
  different machines.
• Applications that are already designed to use
  the multiple processors of a grid setting.
• Applications that need to be modified or
  rewritten to better exploit a grid
• Tools for debugging and measuring the behavior of
  grid applications

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Using a grid An application developers
perspective(2)

• Globus
• developers toolkit
• Manage grid operations
• Measurement
• Repair
• Debug grid applications
• Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)

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A brief survey
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A quick survey
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A quick survey
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A quick survey
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A quick survey
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A quick survey
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A quick survey
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Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE)

• CERN's new particle accelerator
• 15 petabytes(15 million gigabytes) a year
• stack of CDs  more than 20 km high!!!
• 200 sites around the globe
• Over 20 000 computers
• Runing up to 30 000 jobs per day
• Has already served for
• 300 000 chemical compounds in search of potential
  drugs for Flu
• Simulations of over 40 million potential drug
  molecules against malaria

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Questions

• ?