dc7 - 1.0

DebConf7

Speakers
Daniel Bayer
Schedule
Day 14
Room Upper Talk Room
Start time 16:30
Duration 00:30
Info
ID 88
Event type Lecture
Track DebConf
Language English
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Debian for Computational Grids

Packages and the Dissemination of Know How

This talk elucidates the provisioning of dynamic runtime environments for the Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) grid middleware using Debian Linux packages. This directly effects the research of academic groups and industry in their analysis of propriatory or public data.

Among academic groups, the acceptance of computational grids is steadily increasing. The motivation to join a grid is frequently the mere extension of locally available computational power. More and more though it is the internetworking of academic groups with respective locally maintained infrastructures (i.e. databases, special hardware) that is offered directly through their local native interfaces and not by web services. This particularly applies to sciences that are data driven, i.e. physics or biological sciences. Here, groups mutually grant each other access to their compute clusters (sites) and provide storage areas for the distributed and possibly shared access to data.

A computational grid executes arbitrarily heterogeneous and complex workflows. The challenge is to provide as many resources as possible, independently from the executing site, and as homogeneously as possible. The computational load is distributed as jobs, each with specific requirements for runtime environments. For the highest flexibility in assigning jobs to the executing sites and the best-possible use of the available hardware, all software should be made available at all sites in the moment when it is required by a job.

Debian is best-prepared to provide the means for an automated addition of software, particularly when combined with the recent advancements for the virtualisation of machines. With virtual Debian nodes at grid sites, users can reliably combine cross-architecture scripts with architecture binaries or even reliably compile one's code remotely.

This talk elucidates the provisioning of dynamic runtime environments for the Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) grid middleware using Debian Linux packages.