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VGrADS: Extending GrADS

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The Computational Grid, as described in The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure and demonstrated by many proof-of-concept applications, promises to connect computers, databases, and people in a network to solve problems in scientific research and other diverse fields. However, the complexity, unreliability, and overhead of low-level operations in today's systems obscure the Grid's potential. The Virtual Grid Application Development Software (VGrADS) project attacks a fundamental part of this problem - how to more effectively program these highly complex and dynamic systems. It will develop software tools that simplify and accelerate the development of Grid applications and services, while delivering high levels of performance and resource efficiency. This improved usability will greatly expand the community of Grid users and developers. In the process, VGrADS will contribute to both the theory and practice of distributed computation.

VGrADS is based on the earlier GrADS project.  That project explores the scientific and technical problems that must be solved to make grid application development and performance tuning for real applications an everyday practice. In particular, it developed a framework to incorporate rescheduling based on performance monitoring of dynamically-changing resources.

VGrADS is a five-year project, started in October 2003, that extends GrADS in several respects:
  • Virtual Grids (vgrids) provide an additional level of abstraction, allowing separation of concerns between levels of the system.
  • Vgrids enable the system to present additional resource capabilities to applications. In particular, vgrids will be key to controlling fault tolerance and access to online data in VGrADS applications.
  • The set of programming models under VGrADS will expand to include component-based interfaces. These are widely recognized as necessary to the further development of the Grid, and are enabled by capabilities presented by vgrids and their underlying resource classes.
  • In all parts of the project, the emphasis is still on providing user-friendly programming while retaining efficient execution in Grid environments.
The Virtual Grid Application Development Software (VGrADS) project is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award #0331645. It is a collaboration of Rice University, University of California at San Diego, University of California at Santa BarbaraUniversity of Houston, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, and University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Created by slindahl
Last modified 09-14-2006 05:55 PM
 

VGrADS Collaborators include:

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