|
 |
|
 |
| |
Institute on Grid Information, Resource and Workflow Monitoring Services
|
Research Objectives |
|
Institute leader: Norbert Meyer (meyer man.poznan.pl), PSNC
|  |
The primary objective of this institute is the development of general and scalable approaches to an information and monitoring infrastructure for large scale heterogeneous Grids. The resources on a Grid are under the control of different entities and are heterogeneous. The useful integration of these resources and related services is impossible without access to relevant information about their accessibility and state. Also, this information must be properly collected, merged, filtered, and delivered to users, either for other services like resource brokers or to end users and their programs. In addition, to the resource and service oriented point of view, job centred collection of information is important for the better understanding of the general state and behaviour of a Grid. Current Grid information and monitoring frameworks have identifiable drawbacks, as they are either too focused to specific aspects or do not scale enough. The performance of the infrastructures is also not satisfactory, especially when security and reliability are required. The institute will focus its research to better understand the reasons and to find models and frameworks to overcome these limitations. In close collaboration with the institute on system architectures, appropriate architectures for scalable and dependable information and monitoring infrastructures will be investigated and deployed. A possibility for convergence of currently distinct approaches to information services and monitoring services will also be taken into account, with the aim to identify a unified framework. The information provided by the monitoring services will be used to get a better understanding of Grid behaviour. However, the current lack of understanding of grid performance in general, and the non-existence of generally accepted set of metrics to evaluate Grid performance, makes the task of Grid evaluation and performance comparison not possible. The institute will focus on the development of new Grid performance models that will provide the means and tools for the evaluation of services deployed on the Grid. Complex job workflows represent another challenge, as the monitoring information must be synchronously gathered from many different sources and appropriately processed to provide a coherent view (state information) of the whole workflow and its components. The job workflow itself must be extracted from programming models and the monitoring and information services must be tightly coupled with job checkpointing and migration support to provide an environment where even complex job workflows could be easily deployed, executed, and monitored. Models and methods to provide a virtualized end user account system are a specific part of the combined job flow support and information services.
Roadmap version 3 on Grid Information, Resource and Workflow Monitoring Services
Publications related to the Institute on Grid Information, Resource and Workflow Monitoring Services
|
|
|
Research Groups |
|
Research Group
| Participants | Network Monitoring System
| INFN, FORTH
| Integration of TCKPT and PSNC checkpointer
| PSNC, SZTAKI | Storage functionality for distributed checkpointing
| UCO, PSNC | Workflow description languages using high-level Petri nets
| FhG, WWU Muenster
| | Compatibility and conversion of different Grid workflow description languages | FhG, INFN, UNICAL, WWU Muenster
| | Fault tolerance in Grid workflow execution | SZTAKI, UoW | | Extending the SEAGRIN semantic overlay Grid infrastructure with the collaborative workflow management support of the P-GRADE portal | MU, SZTAKI | | User management and accounting framework | MU, PSNC
| |
|
|
Latest Research Highlights |
|
Authorizing Grid Resource Access and Consumption CoreGRID Technical Report TR-0161 [pdf]: The tasks to authorize users access to grid resources and to authorize their regulated consumption is studied and some key functionality is identified. A novel authorization infrastructure is proposed by combining the Virtual User System (VUS) for dynamically assigning local pool-accounts to grid-users and the SweGrid Accounting System (SGAS) for grid-wide usage logging and real-time enforcement of resource pre-allocations. |  | Enhancing Grids for Massively Multiplayer Online Computer Games CoreGRID Technical Report TR-0134 [pdf]: Massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) is an innovative and challenging class of applications for Grid computing that require large amounts of computational resources for providing a responsive and scalable gameplay for concurrently participating players connected via Internet. We present our Real-Time Framework (RTF) – a Gridbased middleware for scaling game sessions through a variety of parallelization and distribution techniques. RTF is described within a novel multi-layer service-oriented architecture that comprises three advanced services – monitoring, capacity planning, and runtime steering – that use the potential of Grid computing to provide pervasive access to a potentially unbounded number of resources. We report experimental results about the quality of our capacity planning and scalability of the RTF distribution mechanism. | 
| A Grid Environment for Real-Time Multiplayer Online Games
CoreGRID Technical Report TR-0133 [pdf]: We present joint work between the University of Innsbruck and University of Münster on targeting online games as a novel class of Grid applications, whose user community (general public) is much broader than of contemporary scientific Grids. Online games are a new, large, generic class of applications not yet studied by the Grid community, with the following distinctive features in comparison to traditional parameter studies or scientific workflows: large number of concurrent users connecting to a single application instance, frequent real-time user interactions, negotiation and enforcement of precise Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, adaptivity to changing loads and levels of user interaction, and competition-oriented interaction between users, other actors, and services. We develop a novel multi-layer, service-oriented architecture for executing online games in a distributed Grid infrastructure. Firstly, scheduling and runtime steering services assist the users in transparently connecting to game sessions while maintaining certain levels of QoS. Secondly, resource allocation, monitoring, and capacity planning services allow efficient resource management that removes the cost and scalability barriers in game hosting. Finally, a Real-Time Framework (RTF) provides the fundamental technology for scaling game sessions to an increased number and density of users through real-time protocols and a variety of parallelization and distribution techniques. |  |
|
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
Home 
Institutes 
