Digital Sherpa is a grid application for executing High Performance Computing (HPC) applications across many grid enabled HPC resources. It automates non-scalable tasks such as staging, job submission and monitoring, including recovery features such as resubmission of failed jobs. The goal is to allow any HPC application to easily interoperate with Digital Sherpa to become a custom grid application. Distributing the jobs across HPC resources increases the amount of computer resources that can be accessed at a given time. Success using Digital Sherpa has been found on the TeraGrid and there are many more applications of Digital Sherpa in progress.

Digital Sherpa is a grid application that allows any other application or user to have access to more resources, improve load balancing and automate tedious and time consuming tasks such as job submission and monitoring in multiple computer systems. Digital Sherpa takes its name from “sherpa” who are known for their great mountaineering skills in the Himalayas, expert route finders and porters. Like the “sherpa” in mountaineering, Digital Sherpa helps an application or user to find their route (available HPC resource that meet their needs), login for you via Grid Security Infrastructure (no more logging in to several machines and trying to keep an eye on several queues), carry some of your gear for you (stage data in), climb to the top (execute job and restart job if necessary) and carry gear out for you (stage data out). Currently Digital Sherpa has the ability to do everything except for choosing the best HPC resource, although it is planned to be implemented in the final stages of the project.