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By Murray Browne, University of Tennessee
The diversity of parallel distributed computing platforms available today is
exceeded only by the variations of software that run on these machines. This
diversity explains why keeping track of what software is deployed, or installed, on
which hardware can be a headache for system administrators and users.
A step toward relieving this problem for the Alliance is a software deployment
database being developed by the National
High-Performance Software Exchange (NHSE) and teams affiliated with the Globus project. The database will track software
installed and deployed at the four sites that provide computing resources to the Alliance.
NHSE is a federally funded effort that is using the Internet to promote the reuse
and distribution of high-performance software. Globus is a collaboration led
by Argonne National Laboratory and the University
of Southern California's Information Sciences
Institute. Its team members are building services for an advanced computational
infrastructure -- the National Technology Grid -- being developed by the Alliance and its sister
organization, NPACI.
The software deployment database was originally implemented as an add-on feature of
a repository built by the Alliance's Enabling Technologies Parallel
Computing team to track which of the team's software was installed at the
various Alliance sites. Built with the Repository
in a Box (RIB) toolkit from the University of Tennessee, the Parallel Computing
team's repository contains a catalog of software ranging from math libraries to
parallel processing tools. The associated software deployment database
provides an at-a-glance matrix of each host machine and its software packages. Each
matrix entry lists the installation status of the software packages on a particular
machine. By clicking on an entry, users call up instructions on how to use the
software on that machine.
New software and machines have been steadily added to this software deployment
database since it was placed online in spring 1998. There are now 20 software
packages and six machines: the IBM SP at the Maui High-Performance Computing
Center, the HP-Convex Exemplar SPP-2200 at the University of Kentucky, the
HP-Convex Exemplar SPP-2000 and SGI Cray Origin2000 at NCSA, and the SGI Cray
POWERCHALLENGEarray and Origin2000 at Boston University.
Now members of the Globus project are working with a team from NHSE to develop
an interface between the
software deployment database and the Globus Metacomputing Directory Service (MDS),
which serves as a directory for information about metacomputing resources.
"Integration of the software deployment database with the LDAP-based MDS will
provide a standards-based, searchable interface to software deployment
information," says Ian Foster, who leads the Globus project at Argonne. (LDAP
stands for Lightweight Development Access Protocol.) "The availability of the
information collected in a repository will advance our goal of developing an
Alliance-wide database that will allow users to request that computation occur on
a computer with certain characteristics, such as installed software."
Eventually the RIB toolkit, which manages the software deployment repository, will
also contribute to the MDS software deployment information system, says Paul
McMahan, NHSE's project leader at the University of Tennessee. "As RIB feeds
updated information to the software deployment repository, it will route the same
updates to MDS so Globus users will also have access to the same information
through MDS's interface," says McMahan.
The work is expected to be completed this summer. NCSA hopes to expand the
repository to include software produced by the other Alliance enabling technologies
teams as well as by application technologies teams.
For more information about RIB and the software deployment grid, contact the RIB team. For questions about MDS, contact mds@globus.org.
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Access Online | Posted 3-12-1999
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