Extending EGEE Virtual Organisations with Desktop Grids and porting applications to this  extended infrastructure"

Sunday 20 September 2009, Barcelona

Tutors: Ad Emmen, Tamas Kiss, Robert Lovas

A Grid can be a powerful number crunching machine bringing the power of thousands of processors to an application developer's finger tips. Although current EGEE VO infrastructures offer significant amount of resources to run computation and data intensive applications, some scenarios still overgrow the capabilities of existing EGEE VOs. Unfortunately, the two main types of Grids infrastructures, Service Grids like EGEE and Desktop Grid systems like BOINC and XtremWeb, were not interoperable until recently. The European EDGeS project is currently developing a bi-directional bridge connecting this diverse collection of resources.

There is a strong collaboration between EGEE and EDGeS in order to extend the EGEE infrastructure with volunteer and institutional desktop grids (DG) and to support EGEE users to migrate their applications to the integrated EGEE-DG (EDGeS) infrastructure. The goal of this tutorial is to train the EGEE user community how to extend their VOs with desktop grids, how such an integrated infrastructure works, and how to port and run their applications on this infrastructure. By extending EGEE VOs with DG systems EGEE users can transparently exploit the spare cycles of the interconnected DG systems that can contain very large number of processors.

The tutorial has two main parts.

Part 1 explains the characteristics of DG systems and their interconnection possibilities with EGEE VOs. Special emphasis will be given to the different characteristics of the security mechanisms applied in EGEE and in DG systems and how they can be harmonized. This part gives practical case studies how to connect EGEE VOs with either local DGs (example with a campus DG) or with public DGs. This part also describes the operational characteristics of the already existing EDGeS infrastructure that connects an EGEE VO and several DG systems.

Part 2 shows the methodology, various methods and tools by which existing EGEE applications can be ported to the integrated infrastructure. Programming an application for a Grid is not easy. Current Grid application development efforts very often use ad-hoc approaches only when porting the applications. Developers do not follow any suggested methodology and this may result in poorly documented systems that do not fulfill user expectations. In order to avoid this trap, support application developers and provide guidelines when porting an application to the EDGeS Grid platform, the EDGeS Application Development Methodology (EADM) has been specified. This part of the tutorial introduces the EDGeS Grid platform (EGEE extended with BOINC and XtremWeb Desktop Grids) and the EDGeS Application Development Methodology. So far 17 applications from fields of bio-science, chemistry, physics, engineering, e-market, etc. have been ported to EDGeS. Case studies of tools that make the application development easier and examples for applications that have been ported to EDGeS using the EADM will be presented.

In both parts live demonstrations will be provided in order to help the audience to try the technology and the existing EDGeS infrastructure.

Target Audience:
Representatives of EGEE user communities who want to extend their VOs with inexpensive DG resources and port existing EGEE applications to the extended EGEE VO infrastructure.