Gridscape - University of Melbourne
Contents
1. 7 GPDK 9 and Legion Portal 10 These toolkits assist in the construction of application specific portals however they operate at a much lower level and aim to provide developers with libraries or low level interfaces to Grid resources in order to assist in portal creation For example GridPort toolkit libraries interfaces have been utilised in the development of NPACI HotPage 8 portal Gridscape on the other hand requires no explicit programming effort in order to create a testbed portal Map Center 11 basically provides a web interface for querying resources by issuing commands such as ping and grid info search for status information The command interface is bit low level for instance one need to supply attributes at LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol syntax level for querying the MDS Gridscape provides high level and user friendly portal interface status of Grid resources is displayed on a geographic map on the testbed and they can be queried further for detailed information 3 Architecture The architecture of Gridscape and its interaction with various Grid components is shown in Figure 1 Gridscape itself consists of three components web application administration tool and interface to grid information service Web Application The web application consists of a customisable template portal which provides an interactive graphical view of resource locations and the ability to monitor its status and details with2. Consequently information services are a vital part of any grid software or infrastructure providing fundamental mechanisms for monitoring and hence for planning and adapting application behavior 3 With the rise in popularity of grid computing we see an increasing number of people moving towards grid enabling their work and their applications Many people are now attempting to harness distributed resources and are setting up grid testbeds Once testbeds have been set up there is a need for some application or portal to enable the viewing and monitoring of the testbed s status Gridscape presented in this paper aims to assist with this problem by assisting the creation of web based portals as well as making administering these portals an easy process The design aims of Gridscape are that it should Allow for the rapid creation of grid testbed portals Allow for simple portal management and administration Provide an interactive and dynamic portal Provide a clear and user friendly overall view of grid testbed resources and Have a flexible design and implementation such that core components can be leveraged it provides a high level of portability and a high level of accessibility from the browsers perspective In the remainder of this paper we further identify the need for Gridscape and how it fits into the grid architecture We then discuss the design and implementation as well as walking through an example of Gridscape s usage
3. the resource by clicking on it with the mouse Once selected we can freely edit such details as its name address and port number Once completed use the Update button to store the changes Deleting an Unwanted Resource If for some reason you need to remove a resource from the testbed simply select the resource and use the Delete button 5 3 3 Querying Testbed Resources Before saving your changes or viewing the web portal online it is a good idea to go into View mode and query the resources by clicking on them with the mouse This will give you confidence that the details you entered were correct and indicate the expected behaviour of your web portal 5 4 Browsing the Testbed Portal Once the customisation is complete the testbed details are saved into a configuration file and deployed on the Web server A snapshot of browsing and monitoring status of the WWG testbed resources through a portal created using Gridscape is shown in Figure 6 The portal can be accessed online by visiting the World Wide Grid Testbed website 19 6 Conclusion and Future Work Currently there are a number of unique applications designed to monitor very specifically details of only one grid testbed This paper identifies the need for a tool of this nature one able to automate the process of creating grid testbed portals We propose Gridscape a tool aimed to meet the needs of those who require a testbed portal but simply don t have the resources a
4. 2 Related Work As mentioned earlier there is a definite need for software to monitor testbeds once they are created However because of the complex nature of grids creating useful tools to gather and present resource information is a challenge There are a number of implementations which currently exist each with their own strengths and weaknesses The majority of these efforts are either application specific portals or portal development toolkits Here we discuss a few representative implementations and compare and contrast their design and development methodologies along with their strengths and weaknesses clarifying the need for a tool such as Gridscape The most basic and perhaps least useful type of implementation is application specific and uses HTML with static content to present resource status information This type of implementation does not provide users with up to date real time feedback about the status of grid resources This type of monitoring tool is easy to create however limits the relevance and usefulness of the information provided and is also difficult to maintain or keep updated Also these types of portals tend to provide complete unprocessed grid resource information data which makes it hard to locate specific characteristic about any given resource thus severely hindering its usefulness Gridscape 133 as a monitoring tool An example of such an implementation is an early version of GRIDView which is used to monito
5. Gridscape A Tool for the Creation of Interactive and Dynamic Grid Testbed Web Portals Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya Grid Computing and Distributed Systems GRIDS Laboratory Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering The University of Melbourne Australia hag raj cs mu oz au Abstract The notion of grid computing has gained an increasing popularity recently as a realistic solution to many of our large scale data storage and processing needs It enables the sharing selection and aggregation of resources geographically distributed across collaborative organisations Now more and more people are beginning to embrace grid computing and thus are seeing the need to set up their own grids and grid testbeds With this comes the need to have some means to enable them to view and monitor the status of the resources in these testbeds Generally developers invest a substantial amount of time and effort developing custom grid testbed monitoring software To overcome this limitation this paper proposes Gridscape a tool that enables the rapid creation of interactive and dynamic testbed portals without any programming effort Gridscape primarily aims to provide a solution for those users who need to create a grid testbed portal but don t necessarily have the time or resources to build a system of their own from scratch 1 Introduction As we develop into an information dependant society the amount of information we produce and t
6. ails of individual resources allows Gridscape to behave as a GIIS to a certain extent in that it provides users with a collection of separate GRIS information from various resources in order to provide more of a holistic view of a grid testbed 4 Design and Implementation The Gridscape web application is designed following the MVC Model View Controller based Model 2 type architecture 14 shown in Figure 2 This architecture which was developed for use with web applications implemented in technology such as Java Server Pages and Servlets provides a means of decoupling 136 Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya the logic and data structures of the application server side business logic code from the presentation components web pages 15 16 In order to make implementation easier and enhance reliability the Jakarta STRUTS framework 17 has been adopted STRUTS provides a framework for building Model 2 type web applications With Gridscape the Model component of the Model 2 architecture becomes the most interesting to investigate further The reason for this is because this is where the main functionality is located within Gridscape Also because of the separation of the presentation control and the business logic achieved with the application s architecture we are able to leverage the Model component from the web application and re use it in the Gridscape Administration Tool We can see that in this way other applications could be
7. be able to see this change This functionality is the same for all options A small pop up window shown in Figure 5 illustrates how one can supply testbed name logo image file and portal deployment location to Gridscape 5 3 2 Managing Testbed Resources The next step in setting up the portal is to tell Gridscape details about the resources which will be involved The Gridscape Admin tool provides the user with two modes an editing and a viewing mode The editing mode allows the user to edit information regarding resources while the viewing mode allows the user to simply browse and query existing resources To add resources to the testbed portal we must enter Edit mode This can be achieved by choosing the appropriate mode from the Mode menu 140 Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya Adding a New Resource To add a new resource to the testbed simply click the mouse in a vacant area on the map Doing this will automatically create a new resource in your testbed Position this resource in a desired location on the map by clicking and dragging this resource with the mouse If the testbed is international then you need supply a name of the country where the resource is physically located Figure 5 shows an addition of a Grid node located in the School of Physics at Melbourne University Editing Resource Details When a new resource is created it is provided with the default property values To change these properties we first need to select
8. developed which also make use of the core functionality provided in the Model by offering a new presentation and control or application layers which access these core components as illustrated in Figure 3 Model Web Containing Grid the core Testbed Browser functionality Resources of Gridscape Fig 2 MVC Model architecture of Gridscape implementation Gridscape Admin Tool Gridscape Web App Model Presentation Application Layers isc Gridscape Tool Fig 3 Flexibility and reuse of the Model component Gridscape 137 observers Observable Observer A A 1 observes n n contains 1 3 g TestbedManager LocationList locationList LocationList locations Vector moo initialise add readLocations remove search size queryResource refresh clear 1 uses 1 contains n Location GridscapeDirectory name String address String Fig 4 Class diagram of the core classes of Gridscape s Model 4 1 The Model So far we have identified the significance of the Model and seen its flexibility The Model itself though consists of a number of important classes In this section we will take a closer look at some of these classes their properties and how they interact with one another 4 1 1 GridscapeDirectory This class provides a convenient wrapper around the necessary elements of the naming and directory access package
9. e CCPE Volume 14 Issue 13 15 Wiley Press USA Nov Dec 2002 Map Center An Open Grid Status Visualization Tool http ccwp7 in2p3 fr mapcenter The Globus Project http www globus org Globus Toolkit 2 2 MDS Technology Brief Draft 4 January 30 2003 http www globus org mds mdstechnologybrief_draft4 pdf Govind Seshadri Understanding JavaServer Pages Model 2 architecture December 1999 http www javaworld com javaworld jw 12 1999 jw 12 ssj jspmve html M Foley STRUTS your stuff ZDNet Australia 11 June 2002 http www zdnet com au builder program java story 0 2000034779 20265872 00 htm Q Mahmoud Servlets and JSP Pages Best Practices March 2003 http developer java sun com developer technicalArticles javaserverpages servl ets jsp Jakarta STRUTS project homepage http jakarta apache org struts The STAMPEDE project Helping utilise the power of many http members optusnet com au dgibbins World Wide Grid Testbed Portal http previn cs mu oz au 8080 gridscape wwe M Placek and R Buyya G Monitor Gridbus web portal for monitoring and steering application execution on global grids Proceedings of the International Workshop on Challenges of Large Applications in Distributed Environments CLADE 2002 In conjunction with HPDC 2003 symposium June 21 24 2003 Seattle USA Gridscape based Portals http previn cs mu oz au 8080 gridscape R Buyya K Branson J Giddy and D Abramso
10. e Information Service GRIS and the Grid Index Information Service GIS 13 At the lowest level there are Information Providers IPs which provide resource data such as current load status CPU configuration Operating system type and version basic file system information memory information and type of network interconnect These IPs interface from any data collection service and report to GRIS The GRIS runs on a resource and contains the set of information relevant to that resource provided by the IPs Individual resources can then be registered to a GIIS which combines individual GRIS services to provide an overall view of the grid The GIIS can be explored and searched to find out information about resources as you would any index Gridscape s Interaction with MDS Gridscape discovers the properties of individual resources of a given testbed by making MDS queries to individual GRIS installations Results are sent back to Gridscape which caches these details for further use Because Gridscape aims to be free of 3 party tools such as a database and because querying distributed resources continually is very costly Gridscape caches the current status of the testbed and allows this store to be shared by any web browsers accessing the portal The current status information held by Gridscape can be automatically updated periodically or an immediate status update can be requested at any time The action of accessing the GRIS to collect det
11. es which can also be edited manually To make customisation easier an administrating tool has been provided Open the template from within the administrating tool to continue with customising your portal Figure 5 shows a snapshot of Gridscape taken while creating a portal for the WWG testbed Gridscape 139 7 ee 7 t a os a eate TH ah ae gt Ui i TEF rC s e ae gt AS A at lt TATAN a REIL Location of Web App appb gridscape dev Ahac Sa N gt Name of Testbed World Wide Grid Tes ee Antarctica Enter name of host Melb Uni Physics Dept Enter Address of host lem ph unimelb edu au Enter port number 2135 Select Country AU Australia v Select Base DN Mds Vo name local o grid v Query Enter grid details University of Melbourne Physics Dept Update Delete Record Fig 5 A snapshot of Gridscape utilisation while creating the WWG portal 5 3 1 Changing Testbed Name Logo and Other Details These items are all customisable from the Options menu If a new logo is required for the web portal for example we can select the Change Logo option We are then presented with a dialog box which allows us to browse for a suitable image for our logo Once the logo is selected we can save the selection and the changes will propagate immediately and directly to the web portal This means that when we next visit the page we will
12. he amount that we desire to consume continues to grow As we continue to advance in this information society we find the need for more sophisticated technology faster computation and large scale storage capacity to handle our information wants and needs on demand in real time Recently we have seen the rise of utilisation of resources distributed across the Internet e g SETI Home 1 in order to solve problems that need large scale computational resources This paradigm is popularly known as grid computing 2 which has the potential of being able to deal with large scale data and compute intensive problems and is opening the door to new innovative computing solutions to problems in both scientific e g bioinformatics 22 and commercial e g portfolio pricing 23 fields The components that make up computational grids include instruments displays computational resources and information resources that are widely distributed in S R Das S K Das Eds IWDC 2003 LNCS 2918 pp 131 142 2003 Springer Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003 132 Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya location and are managed by various organisations Grid technologies enable large scale sharing of these resources and in these settings being able to monitor any resources services and computations is challenging due to the heterogeneous nature large numbers dynamic behavior and geographical distribution of the entities in which a user might be interested
13. n The Virtual Laboratory Enabling Molecular Modeling for Drug Design on the World Wide Grid Journal of Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience Volume 15 Issue 1 Wiley Press Jan 2003 Crawford D Dias A Iyengar M Novaes and L Zhang Commercial Applications of Grid Computing IBM Research Technical Report RC 22702 IBM USA Jan 22 2003
14. n a new instance of the TestbedManager there is only one instance of the data This means that information retrieved from testbed resources is cached making the site more responsive and ensuring that everyone is seeing the same up to date data 5 Gridscape in Practice Gridscape has already been used by a number of virtual organisations to create their Grid testbed portals for visualising and monitoring resources 21 They include Australian Virtual Observatory and UK AstroGrid Collaboration Belle Analysis Data Grid BADG and our own World Wide Grid WWG testbed In this section we will walk through the steps involved in creation of portal for your own Grid testbed using Gridscape and illustrate them with an example of creating a portal for WWG 5 1 Deploying the Gridscape Web Application To begin using Gridscape the user must first deploy the web application within their Jakarta Tomcat installation and also install the administering tool 5 2 Creating Your Portal Creating your own customised testbed portal with Gridscape simply involves customising the blank template portal which is provided with Gridscape Gridscape supports intuitive GUI see Figure 5 using which you can supply various elements of the testbed a testbed logo a map for displaying physical location of resources and details of resources that are part of the testbed 5 3 Customising Your Portal Most of the details about your testbed are stored in configuration fil
15. n early seed for Gridscape We would like to thank Anthony Sulistio for his comments on early drafts of the paper References 1 SETI Home http setiathome ssl berkeley edu 2 Foster and C Kesselman editors The Grid Blueprint for a Future Computing Infrastructure Morgan Kaufmann Publishers San Francisco CA USA 1999 3 MDS 2 2 User s Guide http www globus org mds mdsusersguide pdf 4 US ATLAS GRIDView obsolete http heppc1 uta edu atlas grid status index html 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya NorduGrid Nordic Testbed for Wide Area Computing and Data Handling http www nordugrid org US ATLAS GRIDView current http www hep uta edu mcguigan applet M Thomas S Mock J Boisseau M Dahan K Mueller D Sutton The GridPort Toolkit Architecture for Building Grid Portals Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing Aug 2001 NPACI HotPage https hotpage npaci edu J Novotny The Grid Portal Development Kit Special Issue on Grid Computing Environments Journal of Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience Volume 14 Issue 13 15 Wiley Press USA Nov Dec 2002 Natrajan A Nguyen Tuong M Humphrey M Herrick B Clarke A Grimshaw The Legion Grid Portal Journal of Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experienc
16. r the status of the US Atlas Grid Testbed 4 Another more sophisticated approach is to use dynamic content within HTML such as with PHP This allows for a real time view of how the grid resources are performing which 1s ideal for this type of tool The NorduGrid 5 Grid Monitor is a good example of this providing current load information as well as processed and user friendly Globus MDS 3 Metacomputing Directory Service recently called Monitoring and Discovery Service information One feature lacking from this and the previous implementation is the availability of a spatial or geographical view of the resources It is often useful to be able to have a visual picture of where your resources are located geographically Again the downside to this type of implementation is that it is tailored specifically to a particular testbed or particular needs which means that this monitoring tool cannot be used to monitor any general testbed we may want to monitor An even more sophisticated tool can be produced with the use of technology such as Java and Java Applets This approach has been taken in a number of instances such as the new GRIDView monitoring tool for the US ATLAS Grid Testbed 6 However this implementation doesn t provide the user with immediate and concise information it is again application specific Moving away from the application specific type of portal we see a number of Grid portal development toolkits They include GridPort
17. s of the core Java API It provides us with an easy means of connecting to and querying the resources in the testbed It is easy to see that this class will be invoked whenever we communicate with the testbed resources whether it be through the web application or the admin tool 4 1 2 Location This low level class is used to represent and hold information about a particular resource This information includes things such as the name address port number as well as the MDS data which is gathered from the resource 4 1 3 LocationList As its name suggests this class is used to hold a list of the various locations in a testbed This class extends the Observable class provided by Java Allowing this class to become observable means that developing presentation layers or views which depend on this data is made easy 138 Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya 4 1 4 TestbedManager This class manages the other components within the Model and is responsible for handling queries which are communicated from components outside of the Model It handles the initialisation of the core of the application and handles duties such as searching by allowing other components to collaborate It is interesting to note that while the TestbedManager contains an instance of the LocationList it contains only a singleton instance The benefit of this type of implementation is that through the web application even though each client accessing the application is give
18. scape components will ensure their portability For example if there is a change in MDS access protocols say from LDAP based to XML based Web services we can easily update our MDS access interface without the need of updating other components As the MDS services are utilised by Gridscape while gathering individual Grid node information it seems logical we first discuss MDS components briefly in order to better understand Gridscape s interaction with them Gridscape 135 Globus MDS The MDS reduces the complexity of accessing system information This is achieved by having local systems use a wide variety of information generating and gathering mechanisms but users only need to know how to interact with MDS to access the information MDS acts as a point of convergence between the large number of information sources and the large number of applications and high level services which utilise them The MDS represents information in accordance with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol LDAP 3 LDAP is a set of protocols for accessing information directories LDAP a Lightweight version of the old X 500 Directory Access Protocol supports TCP IP communication and is becoming the standard protocol when dealing with any directory information applications Using an LDAP server MDS provides middleware information in a common interface There are three components which make up the MDS hierarchy Information Providers IPs the Grid Resourc
19. the added ability of being able to submit queries to identify resources with specific characteristics 134 Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya Which resource s have gt 4 Web Web processors 3 cone Browser Browser How many CPUs does resource A en nS Browser Browser Globus GRIS Globus GRIS Grid Node B Grid Node A Grid Node C Fig 1 Gridscape architecture Administration Application The administration tool provides the user with a simple and user friendly way of customising and updating their personal testbed portal Users are able to manage the resources to be used in the portal by adding removing and editing their details Interface to Grid Information Service The information provided by Gridscape is gathered from individual grid resources by accessing the Monitoring and Discovery Service MDS 3 provided by the Information Services component of the Globus Toolkit 12 which is run on them MDS is designed to provide a standard mechanism for publishing and discovering resource status and configuration information It provides a uniform flexible interface to data collected by lower level information providers Within Gridscape interface to MDS component has been basically developed as a Java based class containing high level methods that hide low level details e g LDAP protocols of accessing MDS services This level of separation of low level MDS access mechanisms from other Grid
20. vailable to invest in creating their own software from scratch Gridscape has the potential to provide users with any of the information made available through Globus MDS and allows for quick and easy creation and administration of web based grid testbed portals We are planning to extend Gridscape to support live monitoring of application level utilisation of Grid resources by integrating it with our Grid application management portal called G monitor 20 Gridscape 141 World Wide Grid Testhesd Mit roaolk internet EHplorer Bile Edt Wem Favorites Tools Helo emd a oak EP 2 a G ree Ahia Cf e Gr ot AR gress Ei hip Alpe inns mot aE pric ecape ngiinder jap Oo aco a World Wide Grid Testbed Operating Sysham EF Submit ist all i i fa testhec show info Melb Uni Physics are Dept lem ph unimelb edu au 21 Eater Grid Oesciphay oiimi Dperatng Lice Satam Total CPUs CPT Model Pentnim M Ceppermme CPU Vendor Gemimelnte Compter Fisica Fs Total Sire haga ME KA p E Hoama 3 Fig 6 A snapshot of browsing World Wide Grid testbed portal Availability The Gridscape software and user manual can be downloaded from the Gridbus project website http www gridbus org gridscape Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge and thank Ankur Chakore Yogesh Chadee and Rami Safiya for their contributions in developing the initial portal creation tool called STAMPEDE 18 that served as a
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