Colleagues,

FutureGrid has as two of its many goals the creation of a Grid middleware testing and interoperability testbed as well as the maintenance of standards compliant endpoints against which experiments can be executed. We at the University of Virginia are tasked with bringing up three stacks as well as maintaining standard-endpoints against which these experiments can be run.

We currently have UNICORE 6 and Genesis II endpoints functioning* on X-Ray (a Cray). Over the next few weeks we expect to bring two additional resources, India and Sierra (essentially Linux clusters), on-line in a similar manner (Genesis II is already up on sierra). As called for in the FutureGrid program execution plan, once those two stacks are operational we will begin to work on g-lite (with help we may be able to accelerate that J).  Other standards-compliant endpoints  are welcome in the future (no pun intended), but not part of the current funding plan.

I’m writing the PGI and GIN working groups to see if there is interest in using these resources (endpoints) as a part of either the GIN or PGI work, in particular in demonstrations or projects for OGF in October or SC in November. One of the key differences between these endpoints and others is that they can be expected to persist. These resources will not go away when a demo is done. They will be there as a testbed for future application and middleware development (e.g., a metascheduler that works across g-lite and Unicore 6).

I want to STRESS that these resources are just coming up and ARE NOT YET robust-full time endpoints. I invite the community though to help us find ways to test and use these endpoints.

Andrew

*Functioning here means that there are endpoints up that we have tested with respect to executing BES activities defined by simple JSDL documents, including file staging in the case of the Genesis II endpoints.  Access control in the Genesis II case is via our normal mechanism.  Straight HPC-Basic Profile access and access control via username/password can also be configured as needed. Documentation on these resources, as well as a process to use them more readily is not complete.