Project GRIP

Topic: Interoperability of Grid Infrastructures
Granted by: The European Commission, grant no. IST 32257
Grant Period: 01.01.2002 - 31.12.2003
Contact Person: Dietmar Erwin
Partners: Central Institute for Applied Mathematics, Research Centre Jülich, Germany
Pallas - Gesellschaft für Parallele Anwendungen und Systeme mbH, Germany
Fujitsu - Fujitsu Laboratory of Europe, United Kingdom
University of Warsaw, Poland
Victoria University of Manchester, United Kingdom
Deutscher Wetterdienst, Germany
University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Argonne National Laboratory, USA
Project website:   http://www.grid-interoperability.org/

Synopsis

Several different paradigms have been developed for matching resource requests with resource provision across a distributed infrastructure called a Grid. The best known of these is Globus which provides functionality via a toolkit approach with API and command line interfaces. Another approach is to model the abstractions involved in the resource request and resource provision in a language such as Java so that the abstraction can be propagated to the point at which it is "incarnated", i.e. translated into the scripts necessary for it to run on a particular resource. One such system is UNICORE, developed in Europe and currently deployed across a European wide test bed of HPC centres.

An important theoretical and practical question is whether such paradigms can interoperate, so that the user can use tools from one system to discover and use resources controlled by the other. GRIP (GRid Interoperability Project) is a 2-year project funded by the European Union to realise the interoperability of Globus and UNICORE and to work towards standards for interoperability in the Global Grid Forum.

The GRIP project will demonstrate interoperability of jobs launched via UNICORE and running on resources controlled purely by Globus. Demonstrations will be given of a portal for biomolecular applications built on UNICORE's intuitive job preparation client and of a relocatable weather forecasting model that can access data from large scale weather prediction models run at a large supercomputing and tailor them to local condition by running on local resources with results displayed to a clients workstation.

Goals

  • Defining an interoperable architecture bridging UNICORE and Globus.
  • Implementing the interoperability modules proposed in the architectural concept.
  • Working towards standards within the Grid community.

Status and Results

The GRIP project was successfully completed at the end of 2003 and had its final review in February 2004, in Warsaw.

As a result of the project, UNICORE users can now access resources on sites running Globus; The sites to not have to install UNICORE server software not do users have to install Globus client software or modify existing applications to execute in a heterogeneous Grid environment.

Early in 2002 the Open Grid Service Architecture (OSGA) had been proposed by the Global Grid Forum (GGF) with support from industry. The GRIP project partners recognized from the very beginning that OSGA would have consequences for the long term viability of the project results. The advent of OGSA also presented an opportunity to influence the standards which were to be developed directly and to start developments that allow UNICORE to interoperate not only with Globus but with Grid Services and Web Services in general, once there definition of the services and their interfaces became mature. OGSA did not change the overall objectives of GRIP, however, it influenced directly some of the technical results.

To achieve objectives of GRIP, the interoperability between UNICORE and Globus including initial OGSA compliant services, the following was implemented:
  • An interoperability layer between UNICORE and Globus Toolkit Version 2
  • The interoperability layer between UNICORE and Globus Toolkit Version 3; GTK3 implements Grid Service interfaces compliant with OGSI
  • Access from UNICORE to Web Services as a first step towards Grid Services
  • Interoperability of the Certificate Infrastructures of UNICORE and Globus; the interoperability on the PKI policies has to be determined on a case by case basis
  • A resource broker capable of brokering between UNICORE and Globus resources
  • Ontology of the resource description on an abstract level.
Two important application areas were selected to prove that the interoperability layers work as specified:
  • Biomolecular applications were to be instrumented in such a way that they are Grid aware in any Grid environment and capable to seamlessly use UNICORE and Globus managed resources. The techniques developed here were designed and implemented in a generalised way that they can be used in other application domains.
  • A meteorological application, the Relocatable Local Model (RLM), was to be decomposed in such a way that the components could execute on the most suitable resources in a Grid, independent of the middleware.
The experience of the GRIP partners contributed to the work in many relevant areas within GGF, for example, security, architecture, protocols, workflow, production management, and applications. Notably, the OGSI specification, was influenced by Dave Snelling, one of the architects of UNICORE.

The results of GRIP are made available as Open Source under BSD license. Further development to make UNICORE OGSA compliant is planned to be carried out in a proposed project call UniGrids (Uniform Access to Grid Services) which is in the stage of contract negotiations.

The move from OGSI does not make the results of GRIP obsolete. The concepts and most of the implementation is independent of the underlying specification of interfaces. The interoperability with GTK2 will remain as a supported feature. There will be no further development to enhance and improve the interoperability between UNICORE and GTK3, the OGSI implementation of Globus. UniGrids will support WSRF interoperable with GTK4 and other OGSA compliant services.



last change 14.04.2008 | | Print