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GridAssist is a full-fledged Grid solution that is based on Globus Toolkit 2. It is developed and maintained by DutchSpace in collaboration with the European Space Agency. The original prototype was sucessfully used to simulate the Dutch OMI (Ozone Monitoring Instrument) that flew on the NASA Aura mission. GridAssist is currently being used to develop and run Gaia algorithms, including the Gaia simulator.
The GridAssist application is composed of two major components: the controller that manages all the computational resources and acts as a broker to schedule and subdivide each individual task over all the resources, and the GridAssist client which resides on the user’s node. The client is a Java application that allows the definition of each task/module, the creation of workflows, and the submission and monitoring of each task that is sent to the controller. The controller in turn initiates and triggers each step of the workflow in accordance with the defined node parameters declared in the registry.
As a minimum each site must be running the Globus software (Toolkit 2 or 4), a protocol that allows the authorised user to remotely initiate a job on that particular infrastructure. Most sites offering multiple processors will also have a “local broker”, which in turn will have a local protocol to initiate jobs on other cluster nodes. The GridAssist controller, however, still needs to know about how to treat individual submissions, because according to the number of processing nodes at any site, GridAssist will then send n-number of processes to that particular site. Currently GridAssist supports the following protocols: fork, pbs, lsf, condor and sge.
References
GridAssist documentation can be found under the DutchSpace GREASE Webpage, which was the original name of the project.
An example of its deployment can be found under the GaiaGrid Webpage, which is run by the European Space Agency, ESTEC.
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