headerlogo
scyourway

SC Conference - Activity Details



Nimrod/K: Towards Massively Parallel Dynamic Grid Workflows

Authors:
David Abramson  (Monash University)
Colin Enticott  (Monash University)
Ilkay Altinas  (San Diego Supercomputer Center)
Papers Session
Workflows
Tuesday,  04:00PM - 04:30PM
Room 17A/17B
Abstract:
A challenge for Grid computing is the difficulty in developing software that is parallel, distributed and highly dynamic. Whilst there have been many general purpose mechanisms developed over the years, Grid programming still remains a low level, error prone task. Scientific workflow engines can double as programming environments, and allow a user to compose ‘virtual’ Grid applications from pre-existing components. Whilst existing workflow can specify arbitrary parallel programs, (where components use message passing) they are typically not effective with large and variable parallelism. Here we discuss dynamic dataflow, originally developed for parallel tagged dataflow architectures (TDAs), and show that these can be used for implementing Grid workflows. TDAs spawn parallel threads dynamically without additional programming. We have added TDAs to Kepler, and show that the system can orchestrate workflows that have large amounts of variable parallelism. We demonstrate the system using case studies in chemistry and in cardiac modelling.
The full paper can be found in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and ACM Digital Library
   IEEE Computer Society  /  ACM     2 0   Y E A R S   -   U N L E A S H I N G   T H E   P O W E R   O F   H P C