Date and time

Friday 3 October 2008, 9:00 - 12:30

Description

Registration fees for this workshop are being met by ARCS. There is no cost to attend; however space is limited.

The Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) provides national eResearch infrastructure for supporting Australian researchers.  The ARCS Systems Services team is responsible for hosting eResearch applications and supporting infrastructure for the ARCS National Grid.

There are a wide range of high-performance computing resources available to Australian researchers and all are slightly different. The ARCS National Grid provides a standard interface for efficiently transferring data and securely launching jobs at these resources.

This workshop will provide researchers and eResearch software developers with in depth explanations, hands-on experience (for those with their own laptops) and demonstrations of the tools and services supported by the ARCS National Grid, and how researchers can use them.

Attendees will see how easy it can be to run jobs on remote HPC systems connected to the grid. They will also learn how a custom GUI interface can be developed for their own applications.

Who should attend

This workshop should be helpful to researchers who currently run large calculations on their personal computers and could benefit from high performance computing resources available to them. Existing HPC users and developers will have the chance to see and use tools that will make their life much easier.

Outline

The workshop will provide demonstrations of a variety of tools and services including:

• authorization using x.509 certificates and the Grix tool;
• collaborative resource sharing using the Virtual Organization Management System (VOMS);
• developing customized interfaces for job submission using Grisu;
• staging data for compute jobs;
• submitting parameter sweep jobs using Nimrod;
• obtaining information about available grid resources using MDS;
• automatic compute resource selection using the Gridway metascheduler.
  

Some example applications that use these technologies will also be presented.

What to bring

To participate in the interactive part of the workshop attendees should bring laptops capable of wireless networking. Java 1.5 or later should be installed. Apart from that the operating system is not important.

About the presenters

Daniel Cox is the Interim Systems Services Manager for ARCS, based at eResearch SA. He has a background in software development and has been involved with deployment of ARCS infrastructure including grid and authorisation services. Daniel is particularly interested in making these services easier to use for researchers.

Markus Binsteiner is a staff member at VPAC working full time as a software developer for ARCS. He has been working on user friendly tools such as GRIX and Grisu.

Colin Enticott is currently employed as a research scientist by the Message Lab group at the CaSIT, Monash University. His research focus is in the area of Grid Computing and Workflow Management. Colin is also a project member on the Nimrod ARCS Proto-NeAT project. Previous projects include the Nimrod Portal, the Nimrod Java API and deploying Nimrod on GrangeNet.