| Wednesday, October 17 |
| 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm | |
| |
UGP (The UCLA Grid Portal Software) and the UC System Grid Portals
(90 mins)
Prakashan Korambath and Joan Slottow
View Participants
The UCLA Grid Portal Software (UGP) and Grid Appliances it uses join diverse independently-owned and operated computational clusters together into a Grid without requiring any changes to the way the clusters are operated. UGP has been adopted by the University of California (UC) for use at the campus level and also system wide. Growing demand for computational resources in flat or declining budget environments makes partnering to share resources an essential success factor as well as providing for the most efficient use of those resources.
One key element of UGP is the UGP Grid Portal, which is a web interface to the Grid and which provides a common way of working with the clusters. The Grid Portal enables secure, unified, "anytime-anywhere" access to resources formerly available only to researchers who had highly technical IT skills. Many of today's Grid implementations require more, not less, computer savy on the part of users. UGP handles all Grid related requirements for users and lets the users concentrate on their research.
UGP makes use entirely of open source software: Globus ToolKit, Apache Tomcat, Java, GridSphere, MySQL, Shibboleth, and VNC. UGP itself is opensource and downloadable from http://www.ucgrid.org.
We will begin the session by describing the underlying architecture for a single UGP Grid and the hierarchal architecture of the UC grid: the interaction between the individual UC Campus Grids/Grid Portals and the UC System-Wide Grid Portal. We will discuss the two user types supported: Cluster Users and Pool Users and describe how resources from different clusters and campuses can be pooled in order to facilitate the sharing of resources among users and the most efficient use of the resources themselves. In addition, the institution can choose to shift Cluster Users to Pool Users to eliminate the administrative overhead required to manange individual login ids on the individual clusters themselves.
Following the architectural discussion, as outlined in the agenda, we will concentrate on the user interface provided by UGP and the services provided. Each Grid Portal acts as a single gateway to those resources that are avaiable to a user and does so with a single sign on. UGP provide an easy to use interface for those without complete computer know how, including assistance with preparing input to specific programs while providing full xterm and other services to expert users. Inexperienced users don’t have to know specific editiors and Unix operating systems. The details about how to use specific job schedulers are hidden.
Agenda:
Architecture:
- UGP Single-Campus architecture and Grid
Appliances
- UGP hierarchical Multi-Campus
Architecture: Register Service and
Sync Service
- Security provided by UGP and Globus.
- Individual and Pooled resources.
Grid Portal Services and User Interface
- Workflow for handeling
Usernames/Passwords (user authorization)
including
use of Shibboleth and other identity
managers
- Services provided by UGP: Resource
Discovery, GRAM Job Submission,
Data Management, and data visualization.
Access to similar services on
outside independently-administered
Grids.
- Conventional Web interface vs AJAX
user interfaces.
- Providing X Windows-based applications
on the Web through the use of VNC.
- Application Form -- interactive input
file generation forms for
commonly-used scientific software
packages provides a comprehensive user
interface to these packages for the
purpose of submitting batch jobs.
Generalized form creation makes it easy
to add additional software
packages.
Location: Leonesa II
|
| |
| |
|
| |
| | Slides (PDF): UGP and the UC Grid Portals |