CSC2008 Grid Technologies Theme

Coordinators:

Erwin Laure, CERN
Heinz Stockinger,
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
 

The Grid Track covers several aspects of Grid computing and provides the ability to get hand-on experience with modern Grid tools. A major part will be dedicated to Grid software that is deployed by the WLCG and EGEE projects (both managed by CERN). These projects aim to deploy a large-scale research infrastructure for Grid computing spanning more than 200 sites world-wide. This infrastructure is in regular use by LHC experiments and, through the EGEE project, by several other scientific communities such as biomedicine, astro-physics, chemistry, and earth observation. The lectures will present the Grid software architecture and discuss the interplay of basic Grid software, higher level Grid middleware, and application software.

 

Emphasis will be put on Grid architecture and specific middleware topics in job submission (resource management) and data management. Grid service technologies which are based on extensions to Web Service technologies will be introduced. In several practical exercises the students will learn how to use Grid tools for their data and/or computing intensive applications.


 

Glossary of the different acronyms: http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/gas/

Overview

Series

Type

Lecture

Description

Lecturer

     

 

 

Grid Technologies

Lectures

Lecture 1

Introduction to the Grid computing

This lecture provides an overview about the basics of Grid computing with respect to Grid architecture, middleware, major infrastructures, security and information services.

 

Erwin Laure
 

 

Lecture 2

Resource Management

Most of the users of the Grid software interact with the system by submitting their jobs (executable programs) to a Resource Broker which does a matchmaking on available and requested resources and then dispatches jobs to resources on the Grid. This lecture provides background about the resource management software system and details about how job submission is done.

 

Heinz Stockinger

 

 

 

Lecture 3

Data and Storage Management

One of the main objectives of a Data Grid is the management of large distributed data stores. This lecture gives an overview about replica and meta data management as well as the software tools provided to deal with data and storage management problems.

 

Erwin Laure
 

 

 

Lecture 4

Grid Service Technologies

Recent advances in Grid technologies allow to move from tightly coupled Grid systems to more loosely coupled Grid Services exploiting Web Service technologies. In this lecture we introduce the basic concepts of Grid Services and their underlying standards.

 

Heinz Stockinger

Lecture 5

Grid Applications and Optimisation

In this lecture we will discuss typical Grid applications in HEP and related disciplines as well as techniques to optimise execution times of these applications.


Wrap-up of Grid Technologies Track

Heinz Stockinger

Exercises

Exercise 1
Exercise 2

gLite (Resource and Data Management)

In these two exercises participants will have access to the gLite infrastructure and exercise several aspects of job submission, information services and data management.

 

Erwin Laure
Heinz Stockinger

 

Exercise 3
Exercise 4

Exercise 5

Exercise 6

Mini Projects

Equipped with the basic practical knowledge of using Grid middleware, students will form project teams that are in charge of specific, small projects. The main aim is to experience team work in small project teams as well as real-world challenges in Grid computing applied to specific application domains.

Erwin Laure
Heinz Stockinger

 

 

Prerequisite Knowledge

Desirable prerequisite

 

and

 

References to further information

 

The participant should have basic understanding of :Linux shell Script as well as Java. In addition, some understanding of XML is desirable.

 

References