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OMII-UK LiveCD Demonstrations – Providing Access to Computational Resources for Researchers. AHM 2009 Steve Crouch , Justin Bradley, Yew Bie Cheng, Richard Boardman. Background. Evaluating Grid software is difficult! Just want ‘to have a go’ – determine suitability
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OMII-UK LiveCD Demonstrations – Providing Access to Computational Resources for Researchers AHM 2009 Steve Crouch, Justin Bradley, Yew Bie Cheng, Richard Boardman
Background • Evaluating Grid software is difficult! • Just want ‘to have a go’ – determine suitability • Non-trivial: installation, configuration, security • Evaluation should be easy • But not sacrifice demonstration of features • Provide pre-installed demonstrations of software using real scientific applications • Straightforward, minimum number of steps to use • Time-to-evaluation should be minimal • Obtaining demonstration package • Initialising the package
What is the LiveCD? • Based around Slax LiveCD distribution • Designed to run completely from system RAM • Doesn’t access machine harddisk(s) • Users can either: • Simply boot normal desktop/laptop from the CD • From within a virtual machine, boot from .iso image file • 2GB RAM recommended!
What’s on the LiveCD? • Campus Grid Toolkit (CGT) • Includes GridSAM and AHE • Easy to install and use package providing access to computational and data resources • e.g. PBS, Condor, Sun GridEngine, Globus, LSF • Demonstrations using computational resources: • Fractal – calculate a Mandelbrot set, • Primes – calculate prime numbers • Utilise PBS/Torque cluster (pre-installed) or local ‘fork’
What’s on the LiveCD? • RAPID • Design and deliver web portal interfaces to research applications requiring computational resources • e.g. PBS, Condor, Sun GridEngine • RAPID-created portal demonstrations: • RapidDemo – BLAST application – used by bioinformaticians to take a protein sequence, model it, and attempt to find match in protein database • MinemDemo – Minem application – physics application to model charge distribution in a plasma