Towards a World-Wide Grid Integrating Service Grids and Desktop Grids
Dr. Peter Kacsuk
MTA SZTAKI, Hungary
kacsuk :: sztaki.hu
There are two major grid infrastructure development directions: service grids and desktop grids. Service grids provide a 24/7 service for various e-science user communities that can simultaneously exploit these grids with many different applications. Desktop grids are built on the concept of best efforts but can collect much more resources than service grids. However, they typically support only a small number of projects. Both directions have their advantages and drawbacks. The recently started European EDGeS (Enabling Desktop Grid for e-Science) project will investigate how to integrate service grids and desktop grids keeping the advantages of both systems. It will interconnect the EGEE grid with 6 global volunteer desktop grids and 2 local desktop grids. Desktop grids will be based on BOINC and XtremWeb technologies.
EDGeS will also explore how to merge the programming concepts of service grids and desktop grids. Within the framework of two European projects (EDGeS and CancerGrid) SZTAKI creates a common, graphical, workflow-oriented programming environment that can be used both for service grids and desktop grids, and enables the parameter sweep execution of workflow applications in the integrated EDGeS infrastructure, too.
One of the interconnected desktop grids in EDGeS will be SZTAKI Desktop Grid (SZDG) that has both volunteer and local version. The SZDG contains modified BOINC clients that enable the registration of complete clusters as clients to an SZDG server. SZTAKI Local Desktop Grids can be organized into hierarchy enabling for larger organizations to explore the SZDG technology at various levels of the organizational hierarchy (for example at department level, faculty level and university level inside a university).
Creating an infrastructure that contains service grids extended with volunteer and local desktop grids will lead to a large world-wide grid. In such a WWG system local desktop grids collects local resources (eventually connected into hierarchy) from various institutes while volunteer DGs will collect large number of volunteer home-PCs. Both local DGs and volunteer DGs can be connected to existing service grids extending their guaranteed services with very large number of resources based on the best effort paradigm.
The talk will explain all the technologies mentioned above and will show how they will be investigated within the framework of the EDGeS project.