Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:
February 20, 2002, Wednesday
Time:
11:00am - 12:00pm
Location:
50A-5132 Conference Room
Seminar Speaker:
Paul Lu, University of Alberta
URL:  http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~paullu
Title:
Title: Informal Peer-to-Peer Metacomputing: The Gossamer Project
Abstract:
Metacomputers are disparate computer systems that have been coupled into a larger computational resource. Research projects such as Globus and Legion have made progress by defining new protocols and abstractions for resource management, security, and communication. An apt analogy has been made between metacomputers based on a bottom-up set of services and the electrical power grid infrastructure.

At the University of Alberta, the Gossamer project approaches metacomputing in a more top-down fashion by building new capabilities on top of existing services, open protocols, and proven technologies: PBS, the Web, Secure Shell. We have a "do not re-invent here" philosophy. No superuser access or kernel modifications are required to use Gossamer. Therefore, Gossamer's "informal" and "peer-to-peer" approach does not require local systems administrators to adopt new infrastructure or give up control of their job queues or resources.

So far, the Gossamer project has produced the recently-released PBSWeb system and the prototype Gossamer File System for remote data access. PBSWeb is a Web-based GUI front-end to the Portable Batch System. The Gossamer Informal File System allows applications to remotely access data files from any computer on the Internet. Read access, write access, sparse access, local caching of data, prefetching, and authentication are supported. In this talk, we will describe the Gossamer project, the PBSWeb system, the Gossamer File System, and provide some performance numbers based on our prototype implementation.

PBSWeb: http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~paullu/PBSWeb/
Sponsor of Seminar:
Brent Gorda
Scientific Computing

Contact Esmond G. Ng EGNg@lbl.gov