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This experiment addresses the creation of an integrated environment required to develop new products and processes in the Chemistry sector. This implies the parallel execution and coordination of multiple of heterogeneous and widely distributed resources (databases, computer models, property and cost data, technical reports, and images) achieved by the combination of two outstanding grid tools: GRID superscalar and GridWay.

News

GRIDSs is now distributed as Open Source - June 2007
www.beingrid.eu/index.php
GridWay is part of the Globus Toolkit - June 2007
www.beingrid.eu/index.php

Information about the experiment

This experiment addresses the creation of an integrated environment that enables the automation of new products and processes in the Chemistry sector in a Grid environment.

The process industry spends a lot of resources in the development of new products and processes. Nowadays these processes depend heavily on computers and are basically manual and sequential.

The objetive of the experiment is to implement a development environment that is able to automate these processes in a computational Grid. Grids appear as the ideal venue to enable such an application since they offers tremendous scope to automate studies with virtual access to experts and resources and capabilities to launch integrated experiments.

The added value of the experiment is the increase of the efficiency measured by reductions in development times, systematic accumulation of industrial know-how, and effective use (and re-use) of knowledge and expertise.

The application is developed on top of the integration of two powerful grid tools: GRID superscalar, which provides a grid-unaware programming environment and GridWay, a metascheduler. The integration of both tools will be performed through the GGF standard DRMAA.

Experiment Products

The experimental business BE14 will essentially provide two products:

A Process Industries integrated Grid Solution (PIGridS). Application providers: UniS and LIKAT. PIGridS application will enable to cut down the process and product development from some years to a few months, therefore having a large impact in the business models. This cut down it is obtained by the integration of models for optimization processes and simulation in a single application environment which performance is dramatically increased with the use of the computation power of the grid. PIGridS can be applied to a large set of industry, from Chemistry, materials design (specialty chemicals, design and structure of the materials) and pharmaceutical. PIGridS will be exploited by LIKAT and UniS by means of selling consultancy services to they costumers.

A Grid Applications Development solution (GridAD) based on integrated GRID superscalar and GridWay. Technology providers: BSC-CNS and UCM. GridAD is the result of the integration through the DRMAA OGF standard of two powerful grid tools: GRID superscalar and GridWay. The combination of GRID superscalar and GridWay (GridAD) provides a complete and powerful toolset for the development and deployment of applications in the grid. GRID superscalar is specially unique for the possibility that offers to the programmers to make “invisible” the grid. On the other hand, GridWay is an efficient metascheduler, worldwide known and used. Additionally, there is no solution offered equivalent to the combination of both. GridAD can be both used for computational grids and clusters. GridAD will be distributed as open source and BSC-CNS and UCM will exploit it providing consultancy services.

Grid Platform

The middleware solution used in the project is based on GRID superscalar, GridWay and Globus Toolkit 4.

GRID superscalar (GRIDSs) is an innovative grid programming framework that enables non-grid experts to develop applications that can be run in a computation grid. GRIDSs provides a very user-friendly programming framework to grid environments. GRIDSs not only provides an abstract layer to program applications in the grid, but also is able to increase the performance of the applications by parallelising parts of the application. Applications that can take advantage of GRIDSs are those composed of one or more coarse grain tasks that are called several times during the application execution. GRIDSs will execute the coarse grain tasks in independent grid servers and will execute sequentially those that have data dependencies. However, when no data dependencies exist between two or more tasks, GRIDSs is able to execute them concurrently. GRIDSs is distributed as Open Source under Apache v2 license.
GridWay is a workload management tool and a programming framework for grids based on the Globus Toolkit components, both pre-ws and ws. It allows an unattended and efficient execution of jobs on dynamic grid environments. GridWay automatically performs all the job scheduling steps, provides fault recovery mechanisms, and adapts job scheduling and execution to the changing grid conditions. GridWay supports the Distributed Resource Management Application API, specified by the Global Grid Forum to develop distributed applications. Since the release of GridWay 4.0, intended for Globus Toolkit 4 components, under a liberal license (Apache v2) in January 2005, the GridWay Metascheduler has been downloaded more than a thousand times in 60 different countries; 25% are private companies and 75% are universities and research centres. Companies include integration and consulting companies, and end users in industries such as technology, finance, aerospace, and life sciences. GridWay is a Globus project.

The combination of GRIDSs and GridWay (GridAD) provides a complete and powerful solution for the development and deployment of applications in the grid.

Work in progress

First prototypes of the user application has been implemented and tested with GRIDSs and in a Grid of resources between BSC and UniS.
GRIDSs is now integrated with GridWay. The first tests done with success. The GRIDSs applications without modification run on top of GridWay.
User portal for Grid configuration and application deployment being ported with GridSphere.