GridCOMP - End results - Target audience

End results - Target audience

GridCOMP produced many results such as reference implementations, specifications and standards. This page describes all the results as well as their target audience, to help you see how you can leverage the GridCOMP outcomes.

Component Framework Implementation

Identification of GridCOMP End results

Component framework implementation provides at the end of the project the reference implementation of the GCM. This prototype features a component framework allowing creation of remote components and remote access to them in a transparent manner supporting collective communications. This prototype also includes a deployment framework providing interoperability with several grid schedulers and middlewares as defined in the ETSI standards "GCM Interoperability Deployment" and "GCM Interoperability Application Description".

Identification of GridCOMP Target Audience

The results from Component Framework Implementation targets all software architects in need of a comprehensive framework to express at design time the parallelism and the distribution of an application. Therefore, the architecture of the system itself captures the parallel/distributed aspects, acting as a powerful specification and documentation. Further, developers do not need to spend extensive time to learn distribute programming or implement collective communication, but rather concentrate on the business code and leverage the GCM framework.

Non Functional Component Features

Identification of GridCOMP End results

NFCF, Non Functional Component Features provide at the end of the project a prototype of behavioural skeletons modelling common parallelism exploitation patterns and implementing an autonomic manager taking care of ensuring user supplied performance contracts. The behavioural skeletons themselves are provided as composite GCM components and users can instantiate such composites by providing other components to specify the functional part of the code. Behavioural skeletons enable users to develop and deploy efficient grid parallel applications in a sensibly smaller time, with respect to the time required to develop and deploy applications with similar efficiency built from scratch by the application programmers. The behavioural skeletons provided by Non Functional Component Features at the end of the project implement embarrassingly parallel, parameter sweeping, master/worker as well as several kind of data parallel patterns.

Identification of GridCOMP Target Audience

The results from NFCF target all those communities of programmers that need to develop efficient grid parallel applications exploiting parallelism according to well know parallel patterns (the ones modelled within the behavioural skeletons). In particular, application experts not particularly expert of parallelism exploitation on grids will enjoy the easiness achieved while writing applications using behavioural skeletons. Therefore the main target audience of NFCF results is constituted by all those programmers that need to develop parallel applications (for performance reasons) without being obliged to spend too much time fine tuning the parallelism exploitation related code aspects.

Grid Interactive Development Environment

Identification of GridCOMP End results

In GridCOMP project, we have created a new component-oriented development methodology which enables users to build large-scale Grid systems by integrating independent and possibly distributed software components, via well defined interfaces, into higher level composite components. The main benefit from such an approach is improved productivity. As an implementation of this methodology we have built the Grid integrated development environment (GIDE), which is tightly integrated with Eclipse software framework, and was designed to empower the end user with all the tools necessary to compose, deploy, monitor, and steer Grid applications.

Identification of GridCOMP Target Audience

The GIDE is aimed at supporting several different user groups: Application Developers, Application Users, and Data Centre Operators. In addition to the comon requirements of all potential users, these user groups introduce some specific ones . These have been addressed and verified via our active dissemination including external publications of research papers, tutorial lectures at summer schools, exhibitions at world-level professional summits such as OGF, and hands-on demonstrations including the PlugTests cluster of events in Beijing (Nov. 2007) and OGF-23 in Barcelona (June 2008). Being an open-source software package that conforms to the Eclipse licence, GIDE is freely available for download and installation which has been very important in maintaing very close collaborative links with CoreGRID and other EU projects via our collaboration activities.

Use Cases

Identification of GridCOMP End results

The use cases represent test cases as well as demo applications with respect to the GridCOMP component framework. They point out the advanced features provided by the framework and, through their complete documentation, illustrate how they can be exploited in real world scenarios. The use cases represent a jump start for people new to GCM and are thus vital for the future success of the framework. Industrial partners make use of their respective use cases to highlight the benefits of GridCOMP, both internally and to their customers.

Identification of GridCOMP Target Audience

The use cases are important to promote the capabilities of the GridCOMP framework. Therefore, the target audience is not only applications developers starting to use the framework but all potential users, including software architects and QA managers. For example, IBM, with the biometric identification use case intents to attract people coming from other application domains such as business process management or security by demonstrating what advanced Grid middleware could do for them.
Also, Atos Origin intends to use the GridCOMP results to develop new applications/solutions for several internal departments and for Atos clients that have the same needs of the use case selected (most of the sectors use Oracle-PL/SQL).
GridSystems, INRIA, and the Activeeon spin-off have worked in integrating the results of GridCOMP with the GridSystems' middleware Fura. From the point of view of INRIA this adds a powerful resource manager to the GridCOMP platform, which can be exploited in any market. From the point of view of GridSystems, GridCOMP adds on top of Fura a distributed programming paradigm that complements the offer of the company in the telco, engineering, and financial sectors. GridSystems plans to release a Fura version integrable with GridCOMP during 2009, and the use case applications will be used as demonstrators.

Dissemination

Identification of GridCOMP End results

GridCOMP Work Package 6 aims to disseminate the GCM. As a first result,we have published a set of training materials introducing applications and frameworks produced in GridCOMP. As another result, we are standardizing the GCM definition in four different standards. Two of them have already been officially accepted as ETSI standards "GCM Interoperability Deployment " and "GCM Interoperability Application Description ". The two remaining parts namely “GCM Fractal ADL ” and “GCM Management API (Java, C, WSDL) ” are in the process of standardization (officially accepted as Work Items).

Identification of GridCOMP Target Audience

The training material targets both academic and industrial users which want to have a precise idea of the GCM features. The GCM standardization from WP6 ensures to the GCM users interoperability and guarantees support from industry.