Department of Computer Science
Researcher:
Dr. Cho-Li Wang, Associate Professor (clwang@cs.hku.hk)
Project Title:
Development of Grid Services at CNGrid HKU Grid Point
Project Description:
The goal of CNGrid HKU Grid Point is to provide grid application developers with easy-to-use, efficient and flexible access to the computing services atop widely distributed computational resources. Two gatekeepers have been configured to support portal services and job management. The HKU Grid Point is equipped with various job scheduling and management software such as GOS 4.0, OpenPBS and supports different programming languages e.g. Fortran 90,C, C++, Java with MPI etc. Through a user-friendly portal, users can submit batch jobs based on their specified demands. Three Teraflops computing resources from Department of Computer Science (HKUCS) and four Teraflops from Computer Center (HKUCC) have been integrated into CNGrid by the GOS4.0. A decentralized certificate authority (CA) mechanism is developed to ensure users’ secure and reliable access, i.e. system wide authorization.
Project Significance:
At the HKUCS, there are already about ten applications serving different important projects. General Parallel Computing Platform (GPCP), for example, provides users with a generic interface to submit various types of parallel programs (e.g. MPI and OpenMP). Compared to the traditional job script approach, GPCP allows users to upload a single archive of their source code and data files, and to specify some setting about the computing environment. The GOS will then perform a set of automated steps, including allocating available resources, unpacking the data files, compiling programs and running the executables in a dynamically configured environment. Our platform is also equipped with a Matlab Executor and a Java Executor (for embarrassingly parallel programs) which significantly widen the supported application domains.
Results Achieved:
All the deployed applications have assisted many academic researchers. Taking HKU as an example, GPCP is able to organize an MPI/OpenMP benchmark environment for the under-graduate and post-graduate experimental courses. Matlab helped the Department of Physics in finishing the statistical research of Wigner time delay. Java Executor streamlined some simulation-based P2P research projects. Moreover, GOS is also serving as a test bed for some scientific applications: (1) heat distribution simulator – to study the heat diffusion process; (2) VLSI wire routing simulator – to compute a near-optimal solution for routing wires on a multi-layer chip; (3) Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) – to find regions of local similarity between biological sequences, e.g. nucleotides of DNA sequences. With the fast development of science on various domains, no doubt that more and more research projects will significantly rely on the computing resources provided by our CNGrid HKU Grid Point.
Grid Computing in China
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