Institut für Informatik und Computational Science
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- Peer-to-Peer-Netz ; GRID computing ; Zuverlässigkeit ; Web Services ; Betriebsmittelverwaltung ; Migration (1) (remove)
Institute
In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in available compute capacities. However, these “Grid resources” are rarely accessible in a continuous stream, but rather appear scattered across various machine types, platforms and operating systems, which are coupled by networks of fluctuating bandwidth. It becomes increasingly difficult for scientists to exploit available resources for their applications. We believe that intelligent, self-governing applications should be able to select resources in a dynamic and heterogeneous environment: Migrating applications determine a resource when old capacities are used up. Spawning simulations launch algorithms on external machines to speed up the main execution. Applications are restarted as soon as a failure is detected. All these actions can be taken without human interaction. A distributed compute environment possesses an intrinsic unreliability. Any application that interacts with such an environment must be able to cope with its failing components: deteriorating networks, crashing machines, failing software. We construct a reliable service infrastructure by endowing a service environment with a peer-to-peer topology. This “Grid Peer Services” infrastructure accommodates high-level services like migration and spawning, as well as fundamental services for application launching, file transfer and resource selection. It utilizes existing Grid technology wherever possible to accomplish its tasks. An Application Information Server acts as a generic information registry to all participants in a service environment. The service environment that we developed, allows applications e.g. to send a relocation requests to a migration server. The server selects a new computer based on the transmitted resource requirements. It transfers the application's checkpoint and binary to the new host and resumes the simulation. Although the Grid's underlying resource substrate is not continuous, we achieve persistent computations on Grids by relocating the application. We show with our real-world examples that a traditional genome analysis program can be easily modified to perform self-determined migrations in this service environment.