The Gridbus Project released the next generation of its Grid simulation
software, the GridSim 2.0 toolkit, at the Supercomputing 2002 conference
in Baltimore last month.
The project, based at the University of Melbourne, Australia, included
in the toolkit new features such as full support for simulation of time
or space shared, single or multiprocessor systems, and a new package for
creating visual Grid models, said project director Rajkumar Buyya.
The code has been organized into a base platform that contains entities
for modeling and simulation of schedulers for general parallel and
distributed systems, with economic Grid resource broker and visual
modeler applications on top.
All components developed as part of GridSim are released as open source
under the GPL license to encourage innovation, Buyya said.
The early version of the GridSim toolkit has been used by several
academic and commercial organizations, such as the California Institute
of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Manchester University, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear
Research), the National University of Singapore, Sun Microsystems, IBM,
Unisys, Compaq, and British Telecom, Buyya said. Unisys, for example, is
exploring use of the software in data center modeling, he said.
Contributors to the GridSim software include Buyya; Manzur Murshed of
Monash University; and Anthony Sulistio and Chee Shin Yeo of
Melbourne.
For more information, visit GridBus.org.
More Grid News From SC 2002
At GRID 2002, the Third International Workshop on Grid Computing, Luigi
Fusco of the European Space Agency (www.esa.int) discussed the European
DataGrid (eu-datagrid.org) project and the need for international
cooperation in the management of global issues such as environment and
security.
Jarek Nabrzysky of the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center
discussed the EC-funded GridLab project (GridLab.org) that has attracted
U.S. participation from Sun, HP and Argonne National Laboratory, among
others. Among the features of the project is a middleware-independent
Grid Application Toolkit (GAT).
Jerome Verbeke, Neelakanth Nadgir, Greg Ruetsch, and Ilya Sharapov of
Sun Microsystems presented a framework for large-scale computations for
problems that feature coarse-grained parallelization. The code will
become available as a developer community project named "JNGI" at
jxta.org.
Two Grid papers won awards at the SC 2002 conference.
The Best Student Technical Paper was "Active Proxy-G: Optimizing the
Query Execution Process in the Grid," by Joel Saltz and Tahsin Kurc of
Ohio State University and Henrique Andrade and Alan Sussman of the
University of Maryland. The Grid environment facilitates collaborative
work by allowing many users to query and process geographically
dispersed data. Active Proxy-G is a service that is able to cache query
results to use those results for answering new incoming queries, to
generate sub queries for the parts of a query that cannot be produced
from the cache, and to submit the sub queries for final processing at
application servers that store the raw datasets.
The Best Research Poster was "Faucets: Efficient Resource Allocation on
the Computational Grid," by Mani Potnuru, Sameer Kumar, Jayant DeSouza,
Sindhura Bandhakavi and Laxmikant Kale at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. As the amount of parallel application runs have
increased, so has the need to efficiently share resources across a
distributed system. Faucets, which aims at supporting the metaphor of
computing power as a utility, approaches the problem by treating the
compute power as a commodity and by unleashing a market economy for the
producers and consumers of the computational resources.