Abstract Science gateways require the easy enabling of legacy scientific applications on computing Grids and the generation of user‐friendly interfaces that hide the complexity of the Grid from the user. This paper presents the In‐VIGO approach to the creation and management of science gateways. First, we discuss the virtualization of machines, networks and data to facilitate the dynamic creation of secure execution environments that meet application requirements. Then we discuss the virtualization of applications, i.e. the execution on shared resources of multiple isolated application instances with customized behavior, in the context of In‐VIGO. A Virtual Application Service (VAS) architecture for automatically generating, customizing, deploying, and using virtual applications as Grid services is then described. Starting with a grammar‐based description of the command‐line syntax, the automated process generates the VAS description and the VAS implementation (code for application encapsulation and data binding) that is deployed and made available through a Web interface. A VAS can be customized on a per‐user basis by restricting the capabilities of the original application or by adding to it features such as parameter sweeping. This is a scalable approach to the integration of scientific applications as services into Grids and can be applied to any tool with an arbitrarily complex command‐line syntax. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Summary form only given. Single sign-on (SSO) is an essential desired feature of computational grids. Its implementation is challenging because resources cross administrative domains and are managed by heterogeneous access schemes. We present an approach for single sign-on in a deployed functioning grid called In-VIGO. The approach relies on decoupling grid user accounts from local user accounts and making use of role-based access control lists. Role-based accesses via delegation mechanisms using short-lived user identities enable In-VIGO to handle interactive applications and application-specific authentication mechanisms. This capability is not present in existing grid architectures. SSO implementations for usage scenarios in In-VIGO are described to highlight the applicability of the proposed approach. In particular, access to interactive applications with their own security mechanisms, such as VNC, and access to remote data can be achieved using proxies that delegate In-VIGO user access via short-lived user identities.

In this paper, an online heuristic is proposed and evaluated, for managing the dynamic memory in a computer system with active disks, by physically colocating in disk memory or main memory, the data pages being accessed by a computation slice. This enables a runtime system that can offload the corresponding computation slice to the appropriate processing unit at the disk memory or main memory. A modified version of SEQUITUR, an online compression algorithm, is used to identify the affinity among sets of pages in a virtual memory page reference stream, and a page allocation and replacement policy is presented. The sets of pages identified are shown to closely match the sets of pages referenced by computation slices, using a suite of data access kernels as benchmarks. The paging policy is evaluated with page traces of micro benchmarks and real applications. In memory constrained environments, with additional memory at the disk, most of the benchmarks see improved performance, due to fewer page faults. The paging heuristic can colocate 50% of the affinity sets on average and can offload up to 100% of the computation to disk.

This paper outlines the issues that must be addressed in order to allow cluster management systems such as Condor, DQS (Distributed Queueing Service) and PBS (Portable Batch System) to be transparently used via a wide-area network computing system such as PUNCH (Purdue University Network Computing Hubs).

This paper describes the performance and interoperability issues that arise in the process of integrating cluster management systems into a wide-area network-computing environment, and provides solutions in the context of the Purdue University Network Computing Hubs (PUNCH). The described solution provides users with a single point of access to resources spread across administrative domains, and an intel ligent translation process makes it possible for users to submit jobs to different types of cluster management systems in a transparent manner. The approach does not require any modifications to the cluster management software; however, call-back and caching capabilities that would improve performance and make such systems more interoperable with wide-area computing systems are discussed.