Cloud and Grid Application Development and Computing Environment

The goal of ASKALON is to simplify the development and optimization of applications that can harness the power of Grid and Cloud computing. The ASKALON project crafts a novel environment based on new innovative tools, services, and methodologies to make scientific application development and optimization for real applications and execution on Cloud and Grid environments an everyday practice.

ASKALON Documents ASKALON User Guide Test Askalon ASKALON GUI Webstart version (~ 55 MB, requires J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0+) using JavaTM Web Start (Last update: 2013-01-10) or request a copy using the form: ASKALON-LA.pdf Videos of Askalon components Application composition Workflow scheduling Distributed Enactment Engine Resource management and application deployment with GridARM and Glare

Objectives Invisible Cloud for the End User and Application Developer Support for Workflow Applications and Parameter Studies High Level Application Modelling instead of Programming Generic Optimization of Applications based on Performance and Cost Contraints Advanced Middleware Services based on Genetic Algorithms, Ontologies and Semantic Web Technologies Automatic Prediction and Interpretation of Cloud and Grid behavior Automatic Search for Performance Problems Fault Detection and Management Resource Accounting and Pricing Experiment Management and Control

Features and Technology Service Oriented Architecture Single Access User Portal UML Workflow Editor XML workflow representation (AGWL) X509 certificates support GSI-based grid security enabled customizable online visualization Web Services and WSRF Globus Middleware Amazon EC2 API support Commodity of the Grid (CoG)-based grid acccess

Askalon is designed as a distributed service-oriented architecture comprising the following set of services:

• Resource broker service targets negotiation and reservation of resources required to execute a scientific application.
• Resource monitoring supports the monitoring of Cloud and Grid resources by integrating and extending existing Grid resource monitoring tools and by developing new techniques for resource monitoring (e.g. rule-based monitoring).
• Information service is a general purpose service for scalable discovery, organisation, and maintenance of resource and application-specific data (including online and post-mortem).
• Workflow executor service targets dynamic deployment, coordinated activation, and fault tolerant completion of activities onto the remote Cloud and Grid sites.
• (Meta)-scheduler performs appropriate mapping of single or multiple workflow applications onto resources from the Cloud or Grid. This work continues our initial scheduling efforts in the context of the ZENTURIO experiment management and optimization tool.
  
• Performance prediction is a service through which we are currently investigating new techniques for accurate estimation of execution time of atomic activities and data transfers, as well as of Cloud (spot instances) and Grid resource availability.
• Performance analysis is a service that unifies the performance monitoring, instrumentation and analysis for scientific applications and supports the performance bottleneck interpretation.

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technology

AGWL Workflow Composition

Workflow Execution (Meta) Scheduling Service Enabling Performance Prediction Performance Analysis

Resource Broker Resource Monitoring