The HPC basic profile and SAGA: standardizing compute grid access in the open grid forum
Chris Smith, Thilo Kielmann, Steven J. Newhouse, Marty Humphrey · Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience · 2009
Abstract After seven years of life the Open Grid Forum (OGF), previously the Global Grid Forum, is beginning to produce standards that meet the needs of the community and that are being adopted by commercial and open source software providers. Accessing computational resources, specifically high performance computing (HPC) resources, is a usage scenario that predates the emergence of the Grid, is well understood within the community, and is represented in numerous gathered use cases in different areas of Grid computing. Building on this consensus the HPC Profile Working Group was established within the OGF to standardize access to HPC resources. Its first specification, the HPC Basic Profile 1.0 has been developed and has established interoperability within the community. Alongside the development of this protocol, another group within the OGF, the Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA) working group has been defining a programmatic interface relevant to application developers that encompasses access to compute resources. This paper examines the relationship between the ‘standard’ protocol of the HPC Basic Profile and the programmatic interface of SAGA to access compute resources and assesses how well these address the problems faced by the community of users and application developers. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.