Large-Scale Simulation and Visualization on the Grid with the GridLab Toolkit and Applications

GridLab is European Commission-funded research project for the development of application tools and middleware for Grid environments, and will include capabilities such as dynamic resource brokering, monitoring, data management, security, information, and adaptive services. GridLab technologies are being tested with Cactus (a framework for scientific numerical simulations) and Triana (a visual workflow-oriented data analysis environment).

At iGrid, a Cactus application runs a large-scale black-hole simulation at one site and writes the data to local discs, and then transfers all the data to be post processed and visualized to another site. In the meantime, the application checkpoints and migrates the computation to another machine, possibly several times due to external events such as system performance is decreasing or a machine is going to be shutdown. Every application migration requires a transfer of several gigabytes of checkpoint data, together with the output data for visualization.

URL:

www.gridlab.org/Software/index.html

Contact:

Jarek Nabrzyski, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), Poland, naber @ man.poznan.pl

Collaborators:

PSNC, Poland:
Jarek Nabrzyski

Louisiana State University, USA:
Ed Seidel, Gabrielle Allen

Masaryk University, Czech Republic:
Ludek Matyska

PIONIER National Optical Network, Poland:
Artur Binczewski, Maciej Stroinski

Konrad Zusse Zentrum, Germany:
Alexander Reinefeld

Vrije University, NL:
Thilo Kielmann, Andre Merzky

SZTAKI, Hungary:
Peter Kacsuk

University of Lecce, Italy:
Massimo Cafaro

Cardiff University, UK:
Ian Taylor, Tom Goodale