Marburg Ad-Hoc Grid Environment

Middleware and Tool Support for Service-Oriented Ad-Hoc Grid Computing

Keywords: Grid Computing, Service Oriented Computing, Service Generator, BPEL Workflow, Virtualization, Xen, Eclipse, Software Development

The Grid computing paradigm is attracting a growing number of users developing larger distributed computing projects than ever before. The initial vision of the Grid encompasses the fusion of different high-performance computing centers into a common infrastructure that allows uniform access to those heterogeneous resources.

If the Grid is to fulfill the vision of becoming the next-generation Internet, the complexity of installing and maintaining the Grid must be reduced significantly. The Internet boom was made possible by making access to the Internet intuitive and transparent to the users. As a consequence, the number of users increased exponentially, which further increased the support for and the acceptance of the new medium.

To achieve this goal, a number of new challenges must be taken into account. Currently, a handful of administrators with specialist knowledge manage their Grid infrastructure, configure the separate nodes and preinstall all Grid services which are required. Due to the lack of tool support Grid services are hard and time-consuming to develop; composition of Grid and Web service into distributed applications must be eased. Security is also of vital importance to such an extended Grid system. Since the number of users within a system is increased, new security mechanisms are needed to ensure that malicious code can not harm legitimate services running on the Grid.

In this project, we intend to investigate the potential and the problems involved in realizing a service-oriented ad hoc Grid environment to provide computing resources on demand to every participant.

The objectives of the project are:

• improving the usability of Grid technology
• supporting the separation of Grid middleware and application development
• decreasing the time-to-market for Grid applications
• enabling Grid application development for non-computer science communities
• increase security in Grid environments

Grid Service Generator

The Service Generator is responsible for creating and maintaining the entire Grid middleware specific code base of the service implementation, leaving the application developer free to concentrate on the application logic. Transformation of application code into Grid services will be supported by the use of annotations.

Visual Grid Orchestrator & BPEL4Grid Engine

The Visual Grid Orchestrator (ViGO) provides support for graphical modelling of Grid applications from individual Grid services as the component building blocks. The execution of composed Grid applications is done by BPEL4Grid Engine.

XGE & Image Creation Station

Funding: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, D-Grid Inititiative and IBM Faculty Award (IBM Eclipse Innovation Grant)

Contact: See pages for different sub-projects.