Solutions for Grid Systems And Applications

Although every Grid application is unique, there are some challenges that are common to many applications. Because these challenges come up often, and because they can appear daunting at first, we have documented instances where we and our partners have solved specific challenges using Grid software.

The Globus Alliance section of this website includes a list of e-Science/e-Business projects in which our members participate. It also includes many research papers that describe how Grid software has been used to enable science. The Grid Software section describes many of the individual Grid software components that we have used.

This section of the website describes how we and our partners overcame specific challenges in Grid projects using a combination of Grid software components and application code. Each solution is presented in the context of a specific Grid project. These solutions can be reused or treated as roadmaps to ease the work of developing new applications.

Job Execution Challenges

• Open Life Science Gateway and GRAM
  The challenge: Allow biologists with no prior experience of Grid computing to easily use a gateway environment to run their analysis programs and compose computational workflow scripts without the challenges of a sharp learning curve. Learn how...
• Client scripting for BOINC applications
  The challenge: Finding an alternative to using several different mechanisms to submit and monitor jobs on various resources. Learn how...

Security Challenges

• Registering Users For The Earth System Grid
  The challenge: Add a simple user registration interface to your Grid application so that users need only a simple ID/password combination to "sign in." At the same time, make certain that the application uses "strong" Grid security internally. Learn how...

Monitoring/Managability Challenges

• A Monitoring System For The Earth System Grid
  The challenge: Improve the overall availability of a distributed system by monitoring critical system components, notifying system administrators when services fail, and recording availability of the services over time for later analysis. Learn how...

Data Challenges

• Data Replication For The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory
  The challenge: Replicate large datasets on servers in several locations to improve access times for local users in each place, keeping track of where the replicas are and ensuring that each replica site has all of the necessary files. Learn how...

VO Management Challenges

• The Managed Computation and its Application to EGEE and OSG Requirements
  The challenge: A virtual organization (VO) negotiates an allocation from a resource provider and then disperses that allocation across its members according to VO policy. Learn how...