We present the International Lattice Data Grid (ILDG), a loosely federated grid of grids for sharing data from Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) simulations. The ILDG comprises of metadata, file format and web-service standards, which can be used to wrap regional data-grid interfaces, allowing seamless access to catalogues and data in a diverse set of collaborating regional grids. We discuss the technological underpinnings of the ILDG, primarily the metadata and the middleware, and offer a critique of its various aspects with the hindsight of the design work and the first full year of production.Comment: 13 page

The Grid Datafarm (Gfarm) architecture is designed for global petascale data-intensive computing. It provides a global parallel filesystem with online petascale storage, scalable I/O bandwidth, and scalable parallel processing, and it can exploit local I/O in a grid of clusters with tens of thousands of nodes. Gfarm parallel I/O APIs and commands provide a single filesystem image and manipulate filesystem metadata consistently. Fault tolerance and load balancing are automatically managed by file duplication or re-computation using a command history log. Preliminary performance evaluation has shown scalable disk I/O and network bandwidth on 64 nodes of the Presto III Athlon cluster. The Gfarm parallel I/O write and read operations has achieved data transfer rates of 1.74 GB/s and 1.97 GB/s, respectively, using 64 cluster nodes. The Gfarm parallel file copy reached 443 MB/s with 23 parallel streams on the Myrinet 2000. The Gfarm architecture is expected to enable petascale data-intensive Grid computing with an I/O bandwidth scales to the TB/s range and scalable computational power.

Among scheduling algorithms of scientific workflows, the graph partitioning is a technique to minimize data transfer between nodes or clusters. However, when the graph partitioning is simply applied to a complex workflow DAG, tasks in each parallel phase are not always evenly assigned to computation nodes since the graph partitioning algorithm is not aware of edge directions that represent task dependencies. Thus, we propose a new method of task assignment based on Multi-Constraint Graph Partitioning. This method relates the dimension of weight vectors to the rank of a task phase defined by traversing the task graph. Our algorithm is implemented in the Pwrake workflow system and evaluated the performance of the Montage workflow using a computer cluster. The result shows that the file size accessed from remote nodes is reduced from 88% to 14% of the total file size accessed during the workflow and that the elapsed time is reduced by 31%.

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