The Developer Perspective

1
The Developer Perspective

• GEMEDAGrid-Enabled Microeconometric Data Analysis

2
Design

• initial plan was to extend an existing
  demonstrator that had grid-enabled a related
  problem

• start point review of current technologies

• ad-hoc requirements capture dialogue between
  developers and users
• regular meeting of the full project team
• one-to-one meetings/communication for specific
  issues

data, modelling, presentation
3
Technical Strategy

• Hitch onto established trends ongoing
  investments
• Web service technologies (portals avoid local
  deployment of complex middleware stacks)
• OGSA-DAI
• NGS Oracle for databases, MPI for parallelism

The establishment of a critical mass of
compatible Grid-enabled tools is a necessary
condition for success of e-Social Science in the
UK
4
Development Issues

• small scale project with funding, time and
  scheduling constraints

• e-Science research staff recruitment

• reliability, immaturity of documentation, and
  error reporting for middleware services (esp. NGS)

• software re-use (human capital)
• Athens authentication code from ConvertGrid
• GeoTools (java mapping library) from Hydra I Grid

• dialogue between developer and user (e.g. what is
  a variable?)

5
Lessons Learnt

• development is hostage to staffing issues

• what the user(s) want isn't necessarily what they
  need

• specialist elements of the service are often the
  easiest (in a relative sense) to develop
• parallel code
• visualization displays.

• linking everything together is the difficult bit

6
Software Used
Linux Mandkrake 10.1 Java 1.4.2_06 Tomcat
5.0.28 Globus Toolkit 3.2 OGSA-DAI 4 Java Cog Kit
4 Spring J2EE application framework 1.2.3 DWR
Ajax library ProFTP Oracle 9i RAC edition Python
2.3 (dataset creation wrapper to second Java
instance Cog Kit code) Eclipe
IDE Fortran95MPI C (utiliies for converting
output for use with the map) GeoTools (Java
library for mapping)
7
Future Plans

• The project has now concluded
• Ensuring long term sustainability is a problem
• The plan is for the service/portal to become part
  of the NCeSS demonstrator suite.
• Re-engineering may be required.
• (e.g. for Globus WSRF compliance)

8
GEMEDA Architecture Diagram