The 2005 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing

Burlington Marriott, Burlington, MA, USA

Tutorial Title:

Programming with GRID superscalar

Level

The tutorial is intended for PhD students and young researchers in Grid computing or related fields. The attendees are expected to have some background in Grid computing and programming abilities.

Duration

A half-day

Presenters

Dr. Rosa M. Badia

Email: rosa.m.badia@bsc.es

Dr. Toni Cortes

Email: toni.cortes@bsc.es

Abstract

GRID superscalar is a programming framework that enables to automatically exploit inherent concurrency of sequential applications and to run them in computational Grids. The concurrent execution is performed at task level, where tasks are subroutines or functions that form part of the sequential application that have a certain level of CPU consumption. This is achieved with minimum modifications to the code and the Grid is almost transparent to the programmer.

The framework is composed of three main elements: a code generation tool, a graphical interface (the Deployment Center) and a runtime library. The code generation tool automatically generates a set of files. With this set of files and the original files provided by the programmer, two different binaries are built: the main program (master) and the workers. The Deployment Center is a graphical interface with two main features: Grid configuration setting and checking and automatic deployment of the binaries in the computational Grid. The runtime is called by the binaries on execution time and handles all the automatic parallelization features and automatic submission of tasks in the Grid. The main program is run locally and the workers are run in remote servers in the computational Grid.

GRID superscalar has been developed for three years and currently has stable versions. Different underlying basic middleware can be used: Globus Toolkit 2.4, Globus Toolkit 4.0, Ninf-G2 or directly on top of SSH/SCP.

The tutorial goal is to give and general overview about GRID superscalar, about its internals and about the programming with GRID superscalar. After the tutorial, attendees should be able to develop simple applications with GRID superscalar.

The tutorial will be illustrated with real example.

The background of the tutorial is on Grid programming and automatic parallelization.

Information about GRID superscalar can be found in its website: www.cepba.upc.edu/grid

Tutorial Detailed Description

Introduction to GRID superscalar (55%) 9:00AM-10:30AM

· GRID superscalar objective

· Framework overview

· Code generation: gsstubgen

· Automatic configuration and compilation: Deployment center

· Runtime library features

Break 10:30-10:45am

Programming with GRID superscalar (45%) 10:45AM-Noon

· Users interface:

o The IDL file

o GRID superscalar API

o Configuration files

o Use of checkpointing

· Use of the Deployment center

· Programming Examples

Presenters Bio

Rosa M. Badia holds a PhD from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, Spain, 1994). Before, she graduated on Computer Science at the Facultat d' Informàtica de Barcelona (UPC, 1989). Currently she is Associated Professor at the Computer Architecture Department of the UPC.

Since year 1999 she has been involved in research and development at the European Center of Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA) in performance prediction and modeling of MPI programs, programming models for the Grid and resource management in the Grid.

She has participated in European projects SepTools and Damien, and currently is one of the researchers of the Network of Excellence in Grid computing CoreGrid. Professor Badia has more than 30 international publications in journals and conferences.

In year 2005 the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has been funded and the CEPBA research and development activities have been moved to this center. Dr. Badia has been nominated Manager for Grid computing and clusters activities in BSC.

Toni Cortes holds a Ms.C. Degree in Informatics (1992) and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (1997) from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya . From 1992 to 1998 he was teaching assistant at the Computer Architecture department (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), and he is associate professor at the same department and university since 1998.

Since year 2000 he is Coordinator of the Single-System Image area in the IEEE Cluster Computing Task Force.

He was Vice-dean for International Affairs at the Barcelona School of Informatics (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2000-2004).

From year 2000 he is Manager of the CIRI (CEPBA – IBM Research Institute). In year 2005 the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has been funded and the CEPBA research and development activities have been moved to this center. Dr. Cortes has been nominated Manager for Parallel Input/Output activities in BSC.