The GrADS Project: Software Support for High-Level Grid Application Development

Abstract

Advances in networking technologies will soon make it possible to use the global information infrastructure in a qualitatively different way—as a computational as well as an information resource. As described in the recent book The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, this Grid will connect the nation’s computers, databases, instruments, and people in a seamless web of computing and distributed intelligence, which can be used in an on-demand fashion as a problem-solving resource in many fields of human endeavor—and, in particular, science and engineering. The availability of grid resources will give rise to dramatically new classes of applications, in which computing resources are no longer localized but, rather, distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic; computation is increasingly sophisticated and multidisciplinary; and computation is integrated into our daily lives and, hence, subject to stricter time constraints than at present. The impact of these new applications will be pervasive, ranging from new systems for scientific inquiry, through computing support for crisis management, to the use of ambient computing to enhance personal mobile computing environments. To realize this vision, significant scientific and technical obstacles must be overcome. Principal among these is usability. The goal of the Grid Application Development Software (GrADS) project is to simplify distributed heterogeneous computing in the same way that the World Wide Web simplified information sharing over the Internet. To that end, the project is exploring the scientific and technical problems that must be solved to make it easier for ordinary scientific users to develop, execute, and tune applications on the Grid. In this paper, the authors describe the vision and strategies underlying the GrADS project, including the base software architecture for grid execution and performance monitoring, strategies and tools for construction of applications from libraries of grid-aware components, and development of innovative new science and engineering applications that can exploit these new technologies to run effectively in grid environments.

Asynchronous evolution of the Indian and East Asian Summer Monsoon indicated by Holocene moisture patterns in monsoonal central Asia

“…All calculations and maps were computed using Grid Analysis and Display System (GrADS) Version 1.8 (Berman et al, 2001). …”

Telescoping Languages: A Strategy for Automatic Generation of Scientific Problem-Solving Systems from Annotated Libraries

“…In fact, there is no requirement that the same target machine be used for every invocation in the GrADS project [4], the link phase is replaced by a dynamic optimization phase that distributes work among a heterogeneous collection of processors, tailoring the code and communication to each target machine in the collection.…”

“…In addition, library code can reconfigure itself dynamically for better performance once the size and shape of the data are known. This strategy has been adopted by the GrADS project [4,26], which is building a framework for execution of high-level Grid applications.…”

Designing a resource broker for heterogeneous grids

“…However, they were still too complex and low-level to become popular for general application development. These were followed by programming libraries such as NetSolve [4], Ninf [5], Cactus [6] and GrADS [7] (Figure 1(b)) which provided a software environment to create applications that accessed distributed services in a transparent fashion. While these libraries did a good job of shielding the developer from having to deal with varying Grid conditions, significant effort was still required to develop schedulers and task managers for each application.…”