Portfolio and investment risk analysis on global grids

The financial services industry today produces and consumes huge amounts of data and the processes involved in analysing these data have large and complex resource requirements. The need to analyse the data using such processes and get meaningful results in time, can be met only up to a certain extent by current computer systems. Most service providers attempt to increase efficiency and quality of their service offerings by stacking up more hardware and employing better algorithms for data processing. However, there is a limit to the gains achieved by using such an approach. One viable alternative would be to use emerging technologies such as the Grid. Grid computing and its application to various domains have been actively studied by many groups for more than a decade now. In this paper we explore the use of the Grid in the financial services domain; an area which we believe has not been adequately looked into.     

可扩展网格节点操作系统设计

网格节点从大型主机扩展到小型智能设备,并要求支持语义和基于知识的互操作。该文提出一个适应这些发展趋势的两层网格节点中间件,其网格基础中间件增强本地操作系统,网格服务中间件支持复杂的网格应用。由于传统操作系统设计中的一些典型前提不适应网格的观点,将网格基础中间件设计为虚拟机监督程序、节点管理程序、策略管理程序和多个面向虚拟组织的虚拟机。讨论了网格服务中间件设计中把服务与主体技术结合的疗法。     

Programming Grid Applications with GRID Superscalar

The aim of GRID superscalar is to reduce the development complexity of Grid applications to the minimum, in such a way that writing an application for a computational Grid may be as easy as writing a sequential application. Our assumption is that Grid applications would be in a lot of cases composed of tasks, most of them repetitive. The granularity of these tasks will be of the level of simulations or programs, and the data objects will be files. GRID superscalar allows application developers to write their application in a sequential fashion. The requirements to run that sequential application in a computational Grid are the specification of the interface of the tasks that should be run in the Grid, and, at some points, calls to the GRID superscalar interface functions and link with the run-time library.GRID superscalar provides an underlying run-time that is able to detect the inherent parallelism of the sequential application and performs concurrent task submission. In addition to a data-dependence analysis based on those input/output task parameters which are files, techniques such as file renaming and file locality are applied to increase the application performance. This paper presents the current GRID superscalar prototype based on Globus Toolkit 2.x, together with examples and performance evaluation of some benchmarks.     

Resource-oriented Computing: Design,Implementation, and Evaluation of WSRF.NET

Web services have changed the nature of distributed systems development and operation. The Grid community has begun architecting Grid systems to leverage available commercial and open-source Web services technology through the definition of “stateful resources.” These resource-oriented systems are an extension of service-oriented systems typically built using Web services in that they treat state (and the management of state) as an architectural concern rather than an application-level concern. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of WSRF.NET, a toolkit for building resource-oriented services using the Microsoft .NET platform. We describe the benefits WSRF.NET provides over “pure” .NET Web services for resource-oriented systems development, in terms of programmability (both programming-language abstractions and compile-time tooling) and improved run-time persistence/management of state. The run-time overhead of WSRF.NET is quantitatively evaluated against other technologies that can be used to add state management to Web services. We argue the core WSRF.NET primitives incur negligible overhead compared to typical domain-specific resource manipulation operations. For example, a computational simulation that lasts 10 min and reads/writes 100 medium-sized resources over those 10 min incurs only 0.46% overhead in WSRF.NET operations.     

Dynamic Instrumentation, Performance Monitoring and Analysis of Grid Scientific Workflows

While existing work concentrates on developing QoS models of business workflows and Web services, few tools have been developed to support the monitoring and performance analysis of scientific workflows in Grids. This paper describes novel Grid services for dynamic instrumentation of Grid-based applications, performance monitoring and analysis of Grid scientific workflows. We describe a Grid dynamic instrumentation service that provides a widely accessible interface for other services and users to conduct the dynamic instrumentation of Grid applications during the runtime. We introduce a Grid performance analysis service for Grid scientific workflows. The analysis service utilizes various types of data including workflow graphs, monitoring data of resources, execution status of activities, and performance measurements obtained from the dynamic instrumentation of invoked applications, and provides a rich set of functionalities and features to support the online monitoring and performance analysis of scientific workflows. Workflows and their relevant information including performance metrics are stored and utilized for comparing the performance of constructs of different workflows and for supporting multi-workflow analysis. The work described in this paper is supported in part by the Austrian Science Fund as part of the Aurora Project under contract SFBF1104 and by the European Union through the IST-2002-511385 project K-WfGrid.     

广域网虚拟平台：网格计算和对等计算的融合

近几年,分布式计算领域出现了两个研究热点：网格计算(Grid Computing)和对等计算(PeertoPeer Computing)。网格计算和对等计算以不同的方法组织大规模分布式的资源,包括计算能力、存储资源和带宽等。两者的研究领域有一定的重叠,又有很好的互补性,融合将是必然趋势。我们构想了一个广域网虚拟平台,全世界的计算机连接成一个整体,任何人随时随地都可以得到所需的资源和服务。正是这一理想,驱动着网格计算和对等计算技术的快速进步。     

Computation and visualization of discrete particle systems on gLite-based grid

Three-dimensional simulation of discrete particle systems is performed by the discrete element method (DEM) software on the gLite-based BalticGrid infrastructure. The performance of a parallel algorithm for particles exchanging processors is investigated by using a number of benchmarks. Polydispersed particle systems are visualized by a novel grid e-service VizLitG designed for convenient access and interactive visualization of remote data files located on the grid. Partial dataset transfer from the storage element is implemented in the visualization e-service. The efficiency tests of VizLitG are performed on the datasets of different sizes. Two granular problems associated with triaxial compaction and hopper discharge are solved.     

网格计算——信息化应用的新浪潮

网格是互联网应用的新技术、新观念、新模式。它即将引发下一场信息产业的革命。本文对网格计算的基本概念进行了概要阐述。并从网格技术、网格应用价值前景方面进行了分析与探究。     

网格计算——信息化应用的新浪潮

网格是互联网应用的新技术、新观念、新模式。它即将引发下一场信息产业的革命。本文对网格计算的基本概念进行了概要阐述。并从网格技术、网格应用价值前景方面进行了分析与探究。     

PaGrid: A Mesh Partitioner for Computational Grids

Computational Grids are emerging as a new infrastructure for high performance computing. Since the resources in a Grid can be heterogeneous and distributed, mesh-based applications require a mesh partitioner that considers both processor and network heterogeneity. We have developed a heterogeneous mesh partitioner, called PaGrid. PaGrid uses a multilevel graph partitioning approach, augmented by execution time load balancing in the final uncoarsening phase. We show that minimization of total communication cost (e.g., as used by JOSTLE) can lead to significant load being placed on processors connected by slow links, which results in higher application execution times. Therefore, PaGrid balances the estimated execution time of the application across processors. PaGrid performance is compared with two existing mesh partitioners, METIS 4.0 and JOSTLE 3.0, for mapping several application meshes to two models of heterogeneous computational Grids. PaGrid is found to produce significantly better partitions than JOSTLE and slightly better partitions than METIS in most cases, in terms of estimated application execution time averaged over a large number of runs with different random number seeds.     

Evaluation of an Accounting Model for Dynamic Virtual Organizations

Accounting of Grid resource and service usage determines the central support activity for Grid systems to be adopted as a means for service-oriented computing in Dynamic Virtual Organizations (DVO). An all-embracing study of existing Grid accounting systems has revealed that these approaches focus primarily on technical precision, while they lack a foundation of appropriate economic accounting principles and the support for multi-provider scenarios or virtualization concepts. Consequently, a new, flexible, resource-based accounting model for DVOs was developed, combining technical and economic accounting by means of Activity-based Costing. Driven by a functional evaluation, this paper pursues a full-fledged evaluation of the new, generically applicable Grid accounting model. This is done for the specific environment of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany. Thus, a detailed evaluation methodology and evaluation environment is outlined, leading to actual model-based cost calculations for a defined set of considered Grid services. The results gained are analyzed and respective conclusions on model applicability, optimizations, and further extensions are drawn.     

普适计算中间件技术的研究与进展

当前,普适计算已经成为计算机科学中一个极具活力和影响力的研究领域。普适计算环境规模很大并且具有高度异构性,如网络架构的异构性、硬件平台的异构性、操作系统的异构性、应用服务的异构性等,而普适计算中间件技术可以解决异构性和跨平台特征,提供不同服务的集成应用,因此成为普适计算中的一个研究热点。基于此,本文对于目前国外关于普适计算中间件技术的研究现状做了一个总结;通过分析和比较,给出了普适计算中间件的设计原则;探讨了普适计算中间件技术的未来发展方向。     

网格计算的研究与应用

网格计算是一种新型的分布计算技术.文章介绍了网格系统的概念、特点、功能,阐述了网格的体系结构.并对网格计算技术的应用前景作了分析.     

网格计算的研究与应用

网格计算是一种新型的分布计算技术。文章介绍了网格系统的概念、特点、功能,阐述了网格的体系结构。并对网格计算技术的应用前景作了分析。     

What Does Grid Computing Cost?

Grid computing has gained considerable attention in research and industry. High expectations are associated with the approach. However, so far only few papers have been published about the costs caused by Grid computing. In this article we pursue two main goals: to analyze the different types of costs and to determine the total costs of a resource provider. Our approach is based on the discussion of general cost categories that have to be taken into account. We give concrete numbers for the different categories and use these numbers to estimate the costs in two real life Grids: the EGEE project and the Grid of the pharmaceutical company Novartis. A summarizing discussion concludes the paper.