SUMMARY The Texas Advanced Computing Center provides a variety of high‐end resources to state, national, and international computational scientists and engineers. Many users obtain information about these resources via the Texas Advanced Computing Center user interfaces, which are supported by an information gathering and distribution infrastructure. After a number of years of use, we needed to improve our user interfaces by both redesigning the web interface and adding mobile interfaces. To support this, we also needed to update our information infrastructure. This paper presents our new design, describes how it improves over the previous approach, and shows that this design meets our current and expected future needs. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Users of distributed systems such as the TeraGrid and Open Science Grid can execute their applications on many different systems. We wish to help such users, or the grid schedulers they use, select where to run applications by providing predictions of when tasks will complete if sent to different systems. We make predictions of file transfer times, batch scheduler queue wait times, and application execution times using historical information and instance-based learning techniques. Our prediction errors for data from the TACC lonestar system are 37 percent of mean file transfer time, 115 percent for mean queue wait time, and 72 percent of mean execution time. Our approach achieves significantly lower prediction error on other workloads. We have wrapped these prediction techniques with Web services, making predictions available to users of distributed systems as well as tools such as resource brokers and metaschedulers.

As organizations begin to deploy large computational grids, it has become apparent that systems for observation and control of the resources, services, and applications that make up such grids are needed. Administrators must observe resources and services to ensure that they are operating correctly and must control resources and services to ensure that their operation meets the needs of users. Users are also interested in the operation of resources and services so that they can choose the most appropriate ones to use. We describe a prototype system to monitor and manage computational grids and describe the general software framework for control and observation in distributed environments that it is based on.

Computational grids consisting of large and diverse sets of distributed resources have recently been adopted by organizations such as NASA and the NSF. One key component of a computational grid is an information service that provides information about resources, services and applications to users and their tools. This information is required to use a computational grid and therefore should be available in a timely and reliable manner. In this work, we describe the Globus information service, describe how this service is used, analyze its current performance, and perform trace-driven simulations to evaluate alternative implementations of this grid information service. We find that the majority of the transactions with the information service are changes to the data maintained by the service. We also find that of the three servers we evaluate, one of the commercial products provides the best performance for our workload and that the response time of the information service was not improved during the single experiment we performed with data distributed across two servers.

Some computational grid applications have very large resource requirements and need simultaneous access to resources from more than one parallel computer. Current scheduling systems do not provide mechanisms to gain such simultaneous access without the help of human administrators of the computer systems. In this work, we propose and evaluate several algorithms for supporting advanced reservation of resources in supercomputing scheduling systems. These advanced reservations allow users to request resources from scheduling systems at specific times. We find that the wait times of applications submitted to the queue increases when reservations are supported and the increase depends on how reservations are supported. Further, we find that the best performance is achieved when we assume that applications can be terminated and restarted, backfilling is performed, and relatively accurate run-time predictions are used.

High-speed wide-area networks are expected to enable innovative applications that integrate geographically distributed, high-performance computing, database, graphics and networking resources. However, there is as yet little understanding of the higher-level services required to support these applications, or of the techniques required to implement these services in a scalable, secure manner. We report on a large-scale prototyping effort that has yielded some insights into these issues. Building on the hardware base provided by the I-WAY, a national-scale asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network, we developed an integrated management and application programming system, called I-Soft. This system was deployed at most of the 17 I-WAY sites and used by many of the 60 applications demonstrated on the I-WAY network. In this paper we describe the I-Soft design and report on lessons learned from application experiments. We focus on four novel concepts that we believe may have relevance to future, similar systems: point of presence machines as a means of simplifying implementation and management; scheduler proxies to integrate local schedulers to computational resource brokers; authentication proxies to provide a uniform authentication environment across multiple administrative domains; and network-aware parallel programming tools to hide heterogeneity and improve performance in heterogeneous environments. Lessons learned in building I-Soft have motivated subsequent research and development efforts in the Globus project. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

High-performance execution in distributed computing environments often requires careful selection and configuration not only of computers, networks, and other resources but also of the protocols and algorithms used by applications. Selection and configuration in turn require access to accurate, up-to-date information on the structure and state of available resources. Unfortunately, no standard mechanism exists for organizing or accessing such information. Consequently, different tools and applications adopt ad hoc mechanisms, or they compromise their portability and performance by using default configurations. We propose a solution to this problem: a Metacomputing Directory Service that provides efficient and scalable access to diverse, dynamic, and distributed information about resource structure and state. We define an extensible data model to represent the information required for distributed computing, and we present a scalable, high-performance, distributed implementation. The dat...

High speed wide area networks are expected to enable innovative applications that integrate geographically distributed, high performance computing, database, graphics, and networking resources. However, there is as yet little understanding of the higher level services required to support these applications, or of the techniques required to implement these services in a scalable, secure manner. We report on a large scale prototyping effort that has yielded some insights into these issues. Building on the hardware base provided by the I-WAY, a national scale asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network, we developed an integrated management and application programming system, called I-Soft. This system was deployed at most of the 17 I-WAY sites and used by many of the 60 applications demonstrated on the I-WAY network. We describe the I-Soft design and report on lessons learned from application experiments.