WP3 related activities at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

The research activities of the group at the Vrije Universiteit include research on communication libraries, programming models, runtime adaption of applications, and the development of a Grid Application Toolkit. We are mainly involved in the following projects:

Ibis

• The Ibis communication library, an efficient, flexible and portable communication library that allows highly efficient communication in combination with any Java Virtual Machine. Because Ibis is Java-based, it has the advantages that come with Java, such as portability, support for heterogeneity and security. Ibis has been designed to combine highly efficient communication with support for both heterogeneous networks and malleability. Ibis can be configured dynamically at run time, allowing to combine standard techniques that work "everywhere" (e.g., using TCP) with highly-optimized solutions that are tailored for special cases, like a local Myrinet interconnect. Ibis should be able to provide communication support for any grid application, from the broadcasting of video to massively parallel computations.


• An efficient implementation of Remote Method Invocation (RMI) on top of the Ibis communication library. The Ibis RMI implementation can be used as a drop-in replacement for the Sun's RMI implementation. It is currently used in the ProActive projects of INRIA Sophia Antipolis (also part of CoreGrid WP-3).


• The Group Method Invocation (GMI) model, a generalization of RMI. Unlike RMI which only supports synchronous method invocations on a single object, GMI also allows asynchronous invocations and invocations on groups of objects. With GMI, the invocation and reply schemes can be selected for each method individually at run time. Possible schemes include personalized invocations, combined invocations, discarding results, normal results, combining results, personalizing results, and futures. The different method invocation and reply handling schemes can be combined orthogonally, allowing us to express a large spectrum of communication mechanisms of which RMI and MPI-style collective communication are special cases. With GMI, the invocation and reply schemes can be selected for each method individually at run time.


• A divide and conquer programming model called Satin. Using Satin, a programmer can simply annotate a sequential (recursive) application to turn it into an parallel divide-and-conquer application. Satin uses a novel load-balancing algorithm, Cluster-aware Random Stealing (CRS), which is highly efficient and easy to implement. CRS adapts itself to network conditions and job granularities, and does not require manually-tuned parameters. Satin has been shown to be very efficient, both on homogeneous parallel machines and Grids.
  Recently, Satin has been extended with malleability, fault-tolerance and migration support. Machines can be added to or removed from a running computation transparently (without requiring any support from the application itself). The overhead of this malleability and fault-tolerance mechanism is close to zero when the application runs normally, since extra computation is only required when machines crash (to recompute the lost work).

GridLab

• The Delphoi service provides a unified interface to information about Grid resources. Grid middleware needs to adapt to changing resources for a large variety of operations. Currently, information about Grid resources can be retrieved from various monitoring and information systems. However, the available information is rather low level and also dispersed across many individual sources. The task of the Delphoi service is to retrieve, store and process this low-level information and later reproduce it on an abstraction level that matches the adaptation needs of other middleware services or applications. Delphoi has been developed as part of the EC-funded GridLab project and is currently being used on the project's testbed for adding adaptivity to GridLab's middleware services.


• The Grid Application Toolkit (GAT) is the main focus of the GridLab project. The GAT provides a set of coordinated, generic and flexible APIs for accessing Grid services from generic application codes, portals, data managements systems, etc. GAT is designed in a modular plug-and-play manner, such that tools developed anywhere can be plugged into GAT (although currently, the GAT only uses the tools developed in the GridLab project). Our group is involved in creating a Java implementation of the GAT (JavaGat).

References:

• Jason Maassen, Rob V. van Nieuwpoort, Thilo Kielmann, Kees Verstoep:
  Middleware Adaptation with the Delphoi Service.
  AGridM 2003 Workshop on Adaptive Grid Middleware,
  September 30, 2004, Antibes Juan-les-Pins, France.
  
  
• Rob V. van Nieuwpoort, Jason Maassen, Gosia Wrzesinska, Thilo Kielmann, Henri E. Bal:
  Adaptive Load Balancing for Divide-and-Conquer Grid Applications,
  Accepted for publication in Journal of Supercomputing, 2004.
  
  
• Alexandre Denis, Olivier Aumage, Rutger Hofman, Kees Verstoep, Thilo Kielmann, Henri E. Bal:
  Wide-Area Communication for Grids: An Integrated Solution to Connectivity, Performance and Security Problems,
  HPDC-13,
  June 2004, Honolulu, USA.
  
  
• Rob V. van Nieuwpoort, Jason Maassen, Gosia Wrzesinska, Thilo Kielmann, Henri E. Bal:
  Satin: Simple and Efficient Java-based Grid Programming,
  Accepted for publication in Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing Practices,2004
  
  
• Rob V. van Nieuwpoort:
  Efficient Java-Centric Grid-Computing,
  Ph.D. thesis,
  September 2003, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.,
  
  
• Jason Maassen:
  Method Invocation Based Communication Models for Parallel Programming in Java,
  Ph.D. thesis,
  June 2003, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
  
  
• Rob V. van Nieuwpoort, Jason Maassen, Rutger Hofman, Thilo Kielmann, Henri E. Bal:
  Satin: Simple and Efficient Java-based Grid Programming,
  AGridM 2003 Workshop on Adaptive Grid Middleware,
  September 28, 2003, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.
  
  
• Rob V. van Nieuwpoort, Jason Maassen, Gosia Wrzesinska, Rutger Hofman, Ceriel Jacobs, Thilo Kielmann, Henri E. Bal:
  Ibis: a Flexible and Efficient Java-based Grid Programming Environment,
  Accepted for publication in Concurrency & Computation: Practice & Experience.