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CYFRONET takes part in the following tasks of the CrossGrid project:

 

Workpackage Task/Subtask Achievements after M24
WP1

CrossGrid Application Development

Task1.1: Integration and deployment. CYFRONET takes part in the Subtask 1.1.4:(together with UvA, Univ. Linz) - a testbed will be realised and the various components of the system will be integrated and deployed on it. See Task 5.2 below
WP2

Grid Application Programming Environment

Task 2.4: Interactive and semiautomatic performance evaluation tools - will develop on-line tools that allow application developers to measure, evaluate, and visualise the performance of Grid applications with respect to data transfer, synchronisation and I/O delay as well as CPU, network and storage utilisation. CYFRONET will define performance measurements as well as develop a tool/monitor interface and GUI. G-PM Tool for Application Performance Evaluation: the range of available measurements has been extended with metrics related to collective communication and synchronization operations; support has been added for user-defined measurements, e.g. operation counts. Communication with the OCM-G monitoring system is now built on Grid-based mechanisms.
Visualization functionality was extended by Histogram, Piechart, and Communication Matrix display windows, adjustable to the specifics of performance measurements
WP3

New Grid Services and Tools

Task 3.3: Grid monitoring - all partners of this task will work out the design specification of the monitoring tools. CYFRONET will define the functionality of the monitoring environment to support tools� needs in compliance with a standardised interface as well as develop the corresponding modules of the infrastructure. OCM-G application monitoring system: the system has been successfully implemented and deployed on all project sites. OCM-G has been successfully used to monitor parts of the CrossGrid flood application, submitted via Globus and running on multiple nodes, at the same time cooperating with the CrossGrid G-PM tool, used to visualize the application's execution based on data from OCM-G.

JIMS � JMX-based grid Infrastructure Monitoring System: new functionality has been implemented, including monitoring agents for Linux/Solaris and SNMP, active discovery of entities and a SOAP Gateway.

Task 3.4: Optimisation of data access - will design and implement a system for data access time estimation. The development of the service tool is mainly devolved to CYFRONET, an institution having a wide experience in the field of data management and archiver systems. The second prototype has been released. The main characteristic of the second release include full integration of data access cost estimation with EDG Optor/Reptor, being the result of very good cooperation between task 3.4 and EDG WP2. The provided solution estimates data access cost inside storage nodes for different kinds of storage devices, including hard drives, DiskXtender HSM working with automatic tape libraries and magneto-optical jukebox, as well as the first prototype of data access cost estimation for Castor HSM. The software is based on modern a Component-Expert architecture, which makes the solution flexible and open for future problems.
Task 3.5: Tests and integration - CYFRONET together with other partners in this task, will test all tools and services of WP3 to be able to deliver a middleware layer in the CrossGrid testbed, which will be used by the Applications (WP1) and the Grid Application Programming Environment (WP2).   
WP4

International Testbed Organisation

Task 4.1: Testbed set-up and incremental evolution - the aim in this task is to obtain an infrastructure as flexible as possible that will provide testbeds for other WPs to develop and test their work. Several testbeds will have to coexist offering different services and levels of stability - one of the testbed sites is CYFRONET. The Cyfronet cluster has been recently upgraded to 80 Intel processors (2.4 - 2.6 GHz) and 4 TB disk storage; interfacing to UniTree tape storage (10 TB) has been tested; the HP ProCurve Switch has 40 ports 100Mb/s and 1 port 1Gb/s (uplink). Part of the cluster is identified as CrossGrid testbeds, part will be reserved for EGEE, and the remaining processors will be used as an LHC Computing Grid production cluster - the Cyfronet site was one of the first to be included in the world-wide computing Grid for particle physics (http://mapcentre.rl.ac.uk/graph_World.html). An upgrade to LCG2 software is now being planned.
Task 4.4: Verification and quality control - verification and evaluation of results, e.g. verification of middleware and applications conformance will include verification of: testbed components before production release, middleware and application interoperability, policies and practices, independent review of applications, architecture review of major testbed releases. CYFRONET will contribute taking care of issues related to WP2 and WP3.
WP5

Project Management

5.2 Architecture Team  - Definition of the software architecture of the Project, identifying dependencies between subsystems and developing a layered model of Grid architecture to make CrossGrid an integrated software environment for Grid application developers as well as users. An important part of this work is to follow recent advances in the area of Grid technologies (with particular focus on the emerging OGSA standard), and to conduct analyses and draw up plans on how to prepare CrossGrid software for future compatibility with new service-oriented standards in Grid computing.
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Identification of distinct types of human users and proposing novel support for interactivity in the Grid environment. As an example, one can mention the medical application (WP1.1), where interaction with of a human with a running simulation and runtime steering of that simulation is required. This goal is achieved by the High Level Architecture (HLA) standard. CrossGrid work has resulted in designing a system that will provide fault tolerance for such applications running in the Grid environment.
5.3 Central dissemination - Organization of various Grid events, including major conferences (the first and second AcrossGrids conferences); workshops (Krakow Grid Workshop - three editions in 2001, 2002 and 2003), Project exhibitions - IST2002, IST2003, Open Grid Day, Barcelona 2003, German Grid Day, Heildelberg 2003; Grid tutorials - Globus, EDG, Unicore, GridLab/Cactus tutorial (2002), EuroGrid, Globus Toolkit 3.0 (2003).
- Cyfronet, in cooperation with other CrossGrid Partners, has prepared a prototype CrossGrid tutorial. In the future, this tutorial will be finalized and used to support various groups of Grid technology users in Europe. The tutorial was presented for the first time during the ANWIRE Winter School on Middleware (Jan 2004).