Institutional Desktop Grids Research Articles

Parallelization of Littlewood-Richardson Coefficients Computation and its Integration into the BonjourGrid Meta-Desktop Grid Middleware

This paper shows how to parallelize a compute intensive application in mathematics (Group Theory) for an institutional Desktop Grid platform coordinated by a meta-grid middleware named BonjourGrid. The paper is twofold: it shows how to parallelize a sequential program for a multicore CPU which participates in the computation; and it demonstrates the effort for launching multiple instances of the solutions for the mathematical problem with the BonjourGrid middleware. BonjourGrid is a fully decentralized Desktop Grid middleware. The main results of the paper are: a) an efficient multi-threaded version of a sequential program to compute Littlewood-Richardson coefficients, namely the Multi-LR program and b) a proof of concept, centered around the user needs, for the BonjourGrid middleware dedicated to coordinate multiple instances of programsfor Desktop Grids and with the help of Multi-LR. In this paper, the scientific work consists in starting from a model for the solution of a compute intensive problem in mathematics, to incorporate the concrete model into a middleware and running it on commodity PCs platform managed by an innovative meta Desktop Grid middleware.

Towards a Powerful European DCI Based on Desktop Grids

Service Grids like the EGEE Grid can not provide the required number of resources for many VOs. Therefore extending the capacity of these VOs with volunteer or institutional desktop Grids would significantly increase the number of accessible computing resources that can particularly advantageously be exploited in case of parameter sweep applications. This objective has been achieved by the EDGeS project that built a production infrastructure enabling the extension of gLite VOs with several volunteer and institutional desktop Grids. The paper describes the technical solution of integrating service Grids and desktop Grids and, the actual EDGeS production infrastructure. The main objectives and current achievements of the follow-up EDGI project have also been described showing how the existing EDGeS infrastructure can be further extended with clouds.

Toward a Meta-Grid Middleware

Institutional Desktop Grid systems are attractive for running distributed applications with significant computational requirements. While the rapid increasing number of users and applications running on such systems does demonstrate the potential of Desktop Grid, current implementations follow the old-fashioned master-worker paradigm. Obviously, vulnerability to failures and permanent administrative monitoring are the disadvantages of client-server architectures. Moreover, it is important to exploit existing computing systems in order to make a meta-grid middleware able to support any kind of applications. To bypass this, we propose a novel system, called BonjourGrid, able to orchestrate multiple instances of Institutional Desktop Grid middlewares, able to remove the risk of single-source bottleneck and failure, and able to guaranty the continuity of services in a distributed manner. We choose XtremWeb-CH, Boinc and Condor as computing systems in BonjourGrid. Thus, BonjourGrid can create a specific environment for each user based on XtremWeb-CH, Boinc or Condor. In addition, BonjourGrid can be adapted to fulfill all the requirements of a decentralized job scheduler. In this paper, we set experimentations using the three cited systems: Boinc, Condor and XtremeWeb-CH, in order to analyze the overhead generated by BonjourGrid and its capacity to manage multiple instances of Desktop Grid. The evaluation proves that BonjourGrid is able to manage more than 400 applications instantiated in a concurrent way on an Institutional Desktop Grid using more than 1000 machines. Analyzing the execution of 405 applications with 2110 tasks during 3 hours demonstrates the potential of BonjourGrid concept and shows that, comparing to a classical Desktop Grid, such as Condor, Boinc and XtremWeb-CH, with one central master, BonjourGrid gives an acceptable overhead.