Legacy code repository with broker-based job execution
Gábor Kecskeméti, Gabor Z. Terstyanszky, Tamás Kiss, Péter Kacsuk · SZTAKI Publication Repository (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) · 2006
As Grid technology matures more and more production Grids become available to run computationally intensive scientific applications. However, as these Grids are based on different middleware solutions interoperation between these platforms is one of the major challenges the Grid community is facing today. The P-GRADE/GEMLCA portal is a workflow oriented Grid portal that supports the execution of workflow components simultaneously on multiple Grids based on different underlying technology. Jobs can be submitted to Globus or LCG/gLite based Grids, or can be selected from the GEMLCA legacy code repository. However, as GEMLCA is implemented on top of GT4, it was capable to interact only with GT2 and GT4 based Grids until recently. Moreover, legacy codes selected from the GEMLCA repository were statically mapped to resources. This paper describes how GEMLCA has been ported to the LCG/g-Lite based EGEE infrastructure. Besides simply porting GEMLCA to another middleware it had to be made capable to interact with the EGEE broker solution. A legacy code can not only be selected from the repository, but using its legacy code interface description it is also defined which resources are capable to execute the given code. Based on this information the broker can find the most suitable resource at workflow execution. As a result of this integration the P-GRADE/GEMLCA portal is capable to interact with both Globus and LCG/g-Lite based Grids by the means of either direct or broker-based job submission, or by browsing and selecting the executable from the legacy code repository. The described work illustrates how two important components of production Grids, a legacy code solution and a Grid broker can be successfully integrated. 1.