At LNCC, early grid-related research and development activities started within Project ComCiDis (Distributed Scientific Computing) in 2002, with the purpose of providing guidelines and directions to the SINAPAD initiative, as well as to establish and strengthen national and international collaborations.
The research program of Project GIGA coordinated by RNP includes the thematic area of Large-Scale Distributed Applications, initially with twelve supported subprojects, allowing for the development and maturing of such technology between high-speed interconnected partners, targeting grid middleware and also some applications. The testbed traffic is restricted to supported subprojects. We focus on two of these subprojects, InteGridade 11 and Sinergia, where NCSA 12 participates as an international collaborator on cyberinfrastructures and cyberenvironments. These two subprojects are actually conducted as a single project, involving five with testbed access, and two more connected via Internet only. The institutions involved are: LNCC - ComCiDis (Distributed Scientific Computing Group), UFF - Institute of Computing, CBPF 13, UNICAMP - Institute of Computing, PUC-Rio 14 – Parallelism Lab, and UFRGS – Institute of Informatics, and UFES 15 - Dept. of Informatics. We also count on RNP and SINAPAD as natural partners for providing connectivity and computational resources, respectively. An additional international partner is Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) for access to Nimrod-G 16 based international testbeds and exploring applications based on Nimrod-O. As business partners, we have IBM participating through its academic software program and a local company (Taho) concentrating on wireless connectivity.
The objectives and goals of this joint project include: scalable computing infrastructure, tools and applications; tools and portals for monitoring, submission and scheduling of applications; development of some application-specific interfaces; development and integration of new services, integration of sensors and wireless resources; and application testbeds. The resulting activities distributed among the partners have been the following: implementation of a Grid with the inclusion of some of the partners' local clusters; implementation of a portal; establishment of policies; a monitoring service; scheduling policies and a scheduling service; a data integration service; aspects related to service orchestration; security comformance monitoring; network management services; automatic application transformation tools; accounting; and the porting of some applications.
The current grid infrastructure for the ComCiDis and InteGridade-Sinergia projects includes the use of Globus 2 17, for interconnections, and of SGE 18, OpenPBS 19, and Condor 20 as schedulers within clusters. The implemented portal is servlet-based and includes a monitoring service based on a LUA 21 script collecting information from Globus-MDS. Regarding some current activities we have been working on the development of a data integration service 22, automatic application transformation developments based on EasyGrid 23 24, scheduling 25, hierarchical submission 26, dynamic adaptation 27, and wireless grids 28, among others. We are migrating to Globus 4 and in terms of security, we have been working with Globus certificates and are now moving to MyProxy 29. OpenCA 30 is being used for certification in the SINAPAD grid.
