sicsa student induction day, 2009slide 1 social simulation tutorial session 6: introduction to grids...

SICSA student induction day, 2009 Slide 1

Social Simulation TutorialSession 6: Introduction to grids

and cloud computingInternational Symposium on Grid

ComputingTaipei, Taiwan, 7th March 2010


e-Research

• Increased collaboration in Science, across institutional, disciplinary and national boundaries

• Need for resource sharing:– Data

– Computation

– Scientific instruments

– Remote collaboration & visualisation

• Development of distributed computing infrastructures to support research


e-Research Drivers

• Increased computational capacity & capability

• Increased instrumentation and data capture

• Increased reuse of data

• Lowered costs of instrumentation

• Community data and collaborations

• New forms of scholarly communications

• Network capacity & ubiquity

• Grand challenges in research

• Societal Needs


HPC vs. HTC

•High Performance Computing– Tightly coupled distributed systems

– Single owner and location

– Single machine illusion, largely homogenous

– Standards: MPI and OpenMP

•High Throughput Computing– Loosely coupled distributed systems

– Distributed and provided by multiple parties, heterogeneuous

– Aimed at High Throughput Computing

– Emerging standards driving interoperability


The EGEE Grid Infrastructure

• EGEE, EGEE-II, EGEE III projects funded to provide a production quality grid infrastructure for Europe and beyond, to support research in all disciplines

• Driven by the needs of the high energy physics community

• Certified middleware installation

• Support mechanisms

• Virtual organisation management

• Shared resources, security

• Largest multi-disciplinary grid infrastructure worldwide


612/3/06EGEE Expertise &

Resources• More than 90 partners

• 32 countries

• 12 federations

Major and national Grid projects in Europe, USA, Asia

+ related projects:– BalticGrid, SEE-GRID, EUMedGrid,

EUChinaGrid, EUIndiaGrid, EELA,EUAsiaGrid


Towards EGI

• EGEE is evolving to become the European Grid Initiative (EGI)

• Move towards a sustainable model beyond project based funding through federated structure based on national grid initiatives (NGIs)

• Central coordinating organisation EGI.eu

• Each country represented in EGI Council via its NGI

• Specialist Support Centres to provide support for scientific communities

• Links with other regional initiatives such as the Latin-American Grid Initiative and EUAsiaGrd


Grids and Social Simulation

• Grids provide primarily an HTC service, so are best suited to run ‘parameter sweeps’, where each simulation run executes on a single worker node.

• Using MPI, it is also possible to develop simulation models that make use of multiple worker nodes at the same time.

• Parallelising simulation code like this, however, is not easy and there is a question whether it would not be better to first utilise larger machines (more Cores, more memory)

• A crucial feature of grids is control over where data gets stored and code executed as well as security.


USING EGEE


EGEE Components• gLite Middleware: the ‘glue’ that binds diverse

resources together

• Public key infrastructure – securely identify people

• VO management system – authorise access

• Information system – what resources are available?

• Workload management system – submitting jobs

• Compute elements – contain the worker nodes that run the jobs

• (Storage Elements – manage data)


Job Submission Overview


g-Eclipse

• Eclipse-based environment (cf. RePast!)

• Provides access to different grid resources

• Using graphical user interface rather than command line

• We will use it to access resources in the Gilda training infrastructure

• www.geclipse.eu


Clouds

• Many definitions

• Here: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

• Specifically: Amazon EC2

• Provides virtual machines on demand

• Better demonstrated than explained…


Jobs on Clouds

• How does a job get to get executed on a cloud?

• Could define AMI image to execute job on startup– Disadvantage: have to modify image for each change

• Could ssh / remote desktop into machine and start job

– Disadvantage: does not scale

• Could deploy grid middleware (gLite, etc.)– Disadvantage: complex

• Or use a very simple job submission mechanism…


svn2cloud

• Very basic job submisson mechanism based on subversion source control system

sicsa student induction day, 2009slide 1 social simulation tutorial session 6: introduction to grids...

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