CSE225 Grids and High
Performance Distributed Computing
Spring 2004
Professor
Andrew A. Chien
Each of you will
participate in a course project involving 3-4 students. Everyone taking the course will be involved
in a project. The projects will come from
a short list of types (see below), and will involve a model problem for
Grids. All projects will be developed
and approved in advance in discussions with Professor Chien. Typical projects will include an existing
grid or distributed systems infrastructure and hand-on computer systems
experiments involving new systems or software.
You should
begin planning your project right away, see the Project
Planning Process.
To contact other
students in the class in order to find those with shared interests, click
here.
CSE 225 Projects
Topics List (Spring 2004)
- Resource Description, Selection, and
Binding: Using realistic resource data and several synthetic distributed
application models, perform simulation experiments to explore the efficacy
of several approaches. How well do
different selection and binding strategies work? How well can we do if
system utilization is the primary goal?
Application performance?
Turnaround? How does quality
of service vary as a function of resource utilization, application
resource specification, selection and binding algorithms?
- Open Resource Sharing: Compare the four basic models for
resource sharing – cycle stealing, batch scheduling, and slicing. Perform an in-depth literature study of
the merits and capabilities of each of these approaches – locally and in
federated systems. Build an
experimental framework which allows experiments with these
approaches. How do these approaches
for single resources affect the properties achievable on collections of
resources (e.g. in Grids)? How does
application/user behavior affect the properties achievable for collections
of resources? What are the worst
cases, and can you demonstrate them?
How does the scale of resources affect the capabilities? What real stability and compositional
claims can be made (these are important for life-critical
applications)? How do allocation
mechanisms such as markets and trade affect the ability to made such
claims?
- Application-driven Evaluation of
Grid infrastructures: From the
perspective of an important computational science application (e.g.
Climate modeling, Protein Folding, Toxic Chemical diffusion, etc.),
analyze the capabilities of current and future grid hardware
infrastructures and technologies.
Working with application experts who are well versed in the
computational issues (we have several such volunteers), develop a performance
model and simulation which includes a distributed application
architecture, a resource description used to acquire resources,
performance models for each element, and scaling characteristics. Use this simulation infrastructure to
evaluate achievable performance of Grid deployments of these applications.
- Data-intensive applications:
Traditional models of distributed filesystems and databases presume
low-bandwidth networks and federation and sharing at a high-level of the
system (and semantics). Presuming
high speed networks (dedicated 10Gig or more), consider architectures
which share data at a low-level (partitions of disks). At what network speeds and latencies are
these architectures competitive with local-disk systems? At what granularity of data are
traditional “database systems” relocatable? What are the benefits that accrue in
terms of fault-tolerance, resource efficiency, performance, new
capability? How do problems of
federated data change with the real prospect of direct access and data
mobility? This project is VERY
CHALLENGING.
- Security: many things are possible,
but hard to do an experimental project.
Possible
infrastructures for use include:
1)
Grid modeling tools such as the MicroGrid infrastructure
(see http://www-csag.ucsd.edu/projects/grid/microgrid.html
) and SimGrid infrastructure (see http://gcl.ucsd.edu/simgrid/
)
2)
the XtremeWeb, BOINC, or Condor systems for distributed
computing (see http://www.xtremweb.net, http://boinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/, and http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor)
3)
the Globus toolkit 3.x, (see http://www.globus.org/ )
4)
general web services infrastructure (too many to list)
We have source code
for many of these systems. However, it
is important to understand that not all projects need involve modification to
the source code. Computer system
resources that will be available to support course projects include:
- a small number of Linux
workstations, as part of the Active
Web project,
- possible large number of Linux
workstations (100) and disk (50TB) as part of the FWGrid project,
- a larger number of Linux server (40)
for work on the MicroGrid,
- access to SDSC and Teragrid
Resources,
- GradLab resources,
- any other resources you may have
acceptable access to.
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