applications
2009-11-04
Get acquainted with one XtreemOS partner: Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
Early in 2004 the Ministry of Education and Science (Spanish Government), Generalitat de Catalunya (local Catalan Government) and Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) took the initiative of creating a National Supercomputing Center in Barcelona. BSC-CNS (Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación) is the National Supercomputing Facility in Spain and was officially constituted in April 2005. BSC-CNS manages MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, located at the Torre Girona chapel. The mission of BSC-CNS is to investigate, develop and manage information technology in order to facilitate scientific progress. With this aim, special dedication has been taken to areas such as Computational Sciences, Life Sciences and Earth Sciences.
All these activities are complementary to each other and very tightly related. In this way, a multidisciplinary loop is set up: our exposure to industrial and non-computer science academic practices improves our understanding of the needs and helps us focusing our basic research towards improving those practices. The result is very positive both for our research work as well as for improving the way we service our society.
BSC contribution to XtreemOS
- Application execution management
The main task of BSC in XtreemOS is to lead the research and development of the Application Execution Management (AEM) module. This module is in charge of setting the whole environment to run jobs in the grid (build reservations, allocate resources, schedule jobs, launch processes, etc.) and to control and monitor them (maintaining the state, allow thread-level monitoring, etc.).
Specifically BSC is highly involved in the scalable job management avoiding any kind of bottleneck as well as on the monitoring that allows users to monitor a job just as if it were a Linux process (you can even monitor the change of thread states).
- XtreemFS
In the data management module, the storage system research group is in charge of the algorithm to locate the best replica of a file as well as to decide when and where replicas should be created and/or removed. This mechanism is base on an improved version of the Vivaldi algorithm that places all XtreemOS nodes into a 2D space based on communication latencies.
Mobile-device flavor
Regarding mobile devices, BSC is cooperating with TiD to build the embedded version of XtreemOS to be run on mobile devices. Mainly, BSC is working on the AEM and XtreemFS modules of XtreemOS-G for these devices.
Applications
Finally, BSC is porting two applications trying to take full advantage of the benefits of this new system. These applications are specweb 2005 and hmmpfam which runs on top of COMPSs a workflow manager that is also ported to its full efficiency to XtreemOS by BSC.
