Grid Software Development Kit (SDK)

Overview

The Grid computing paradigm allows collaborative pooling of distributed resources across multiple domains. However, the benefits of the Grid are limited to those offered by the application development framework used. Several elegant and flexible application development frameworks only support specific Grid architectures thereby not allowing the applications to exploit the full potential of the Grid. In order to initiate community interest to standardize a high level abstraction layer for different Grid architectures, the Grid SDK introduces a collection of abstractions and data structures. 

As a proof of concept, we are in the process of developing a reference implementation in Java. The UML class diagram for Grid SDK is shown in Figure 1. The current version of Grid SDK is capable of handling tasks for Globus Toolkit versions $2$ and $3$. Other architectures will be supported in the future based on the availability of resources. 

Figure 1: UML Class Diagram of Grid SDK.

Applications of Grid SDK are manifold. It can be used as convenient abstraction for elementary Grid functionality to develop Grid middleware, high level Grid services, and Grid applications (see Figure 2). The abstractions included in Grid SDK will also simplify the development of advanced user interfaces and portals to Grids. Part of the needed functionality that such interactive Grid environments need are moving of files, remote execution of tasks, expressing and visualizing task dependencies, as well as the convenient management of tasks in a to the user familiar paradigm such as a drag and drop desktop. 

Figure 2: High-level Application Development Environment using Grid SDK.

Contacts

This is a work in progress. For more information please contact:

Gregor von Laszewski
Argonne National Laboratory
9700 South Cass Avenue
Argonne, IL 60439
gregor@mcs.anl.gov
(630) 252 0472

Team

• Kaizar Amin (amin@mcs.anl.gov)
• Gregor von Laszewski (gregor@mcs.anl.gov).

Mailing List

Mailing list for this project is gridsdk@globus.org. You can subscribe to it by sending an email to majordomo@globus.org with the body subscribe gridsdk <email address>. An archive for the list is available.  

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Mathematical, Information, and Computational Science Division subprogram of the Office of Advance Scientific Computing Research, U.S. Department of Energy under Contract W-31-109-Eng-38. DARPA, DOE, NSF support for the Globus Toolkit research and development. We thank all the members of the Globus Project for their valuable help. 

References