Advanced services in the Polish Grid were presented at the PL-Grid exhibition booth at EGEE’09 event in Barcelona

The main goal of the PL-Grid project is to provide the Polish scientific community with an IT platform based on Grid computer clusters, enabling e-Science research in various fields. Specialized, domain Grid systems – including services and tools focused on specific types of applications – will be built upon this infrastructure. 

The PL-Grid project was present at the EGEE'09 exhibition in Barcelona, from 21 to 24 September 2009. All interested people, who participated in the EGEE’09 event, could visit our booth no7 (see the floor plan) where they had an opportunity to get some information on advanced services which were developed within the PL-Grid project. The services were presented as demonstrations or posters:

• Virtual Laboratory Powered by GridSpace in PL-Grid (a demo)

The GridSpace platform serves as a basis for the virtual laboratory developed in the PL-Grid project. In GridSpace, the high-level notation for composition of complex applications is based on the Ruby scripting language. To provide an easy access to different computing and data resources, we have introduced a grid object abstraction level hierarchy.
The virtual laboratory is equipped with tools for user-friendly experiment creation and execution, enabling reusing of existing experiments, gathering and exploiting provenance information, as well as integration of geographically-distributed compute and data resources.

• An Efficient Resource-related SLA Management with Bazaar Portal (a demo)
  

On the global computational market, that EGEE infrastructure grows to be, there are hundreds of actors providing and using computational resources. It is useful to define the terms of services, usually called SLAs, between a VO and a resource centre. Due to a large number of interactions as well as many details that should be negotiated in each case, a formalized, traceable and efficient process should be introduced. "Bazaar" is a web portal aiming at facilitating resource management process for both VO managers and resource operators. Functionality includes: defining and broadcasting calls for resources, negotiating and managing SLAs, managing communication between partners. The tool is maintained within PL-Grid Project and deployed for operation in Polish NGI, in Central European ROC within EGEE Project, and in EGEE seed-resources activity. For more information please refer: http://grid.cyfronet.pl/bazaar/

• Contract based Virtual Organizations in PL-Grid (a poster)

Modern scientific and business applications are becoming increasingly complex and they require that the underlying Grid middleware is properly configured. These applications often include workflow type problems, interactive collaboration systems or the ones with real-time constraints. In order to cope with such requirements in heterogeneous environments we propose the use of semantically enhanced Virtual Organizations on top of Grid infrastructures. Within the Polish National Grid initiative, a novel system will be developed which will use the semantic annotation of resources within the Grid in order to enable contract based inception and management of Virtual Organizations, contract negotiation interface, automated VO deployment based on the contract statements including SLA enforcement and security configuration as well as contract monitoring facilities. The poster will present vision and architecture of the mentioned framework and its place within the Polish National Grid initiative.

• The Migrating Desktop (a poster)

The Migrating Desktop is a powerful user interface, that hides the middleware complexity and provides user-friendly and intuitive access to the resources.
Key product features include: simple applications integration, easy job defining, submission, and tracking as well as intuitive management of grid data. The Migrating Desktop was created in the CrossGrid project and proved its usefulness in everyday work of BalticGrid and Int.eu.grid projects users' communities. Accepted for EGEE RESPECT program, currently is developed in BalticGrid-II and PL-Grid projects.

• Checkpointing  (a poster)

One of the service we will provide under the middleware is checkpointing to be used for fault tolerant grids based on virtualisation technology.
Ensuring proper fault tolerance for long-running applications is one of the problems the PL-Grid is trying to solve. The growing popularity of virtualization software available for modern OS makes it possible to employ its freeze-and-resume features to acquire checkpoint/restart functionality. We are striving to provide an integration of virtualization with the Grid middleware in order to ensure a seamless blend of those technologies. The goal is to provide an automatic or grid-workflow driven mechanism allowing for more fault-tolerant and flexible computing environments.


At the PL-Grid stand some Project promotional materials have also been available.