By Rich Wellner
At Univa UD we deal with a variety of different customers. These folks are trying to solve business problems in a semiconductor, life science, financial services, big science and lots of other sectors. What they have in common is that they have existing infrastructure and are hyper-concerned about business disruption while moving in a new direction. They should be.
There are a lot of ways to approach grid computing that require you to replace what you have with something new. This is particularly the case for vendors of proprietary tools. These tools are built on proprietary protocols that make it difficult to integrate other services or applications. Combine these two issues and it can be tough to get anything bigger than a cluster up and running. If you already have a cluster, or more, up and running, this disruption will have a real impact on your ability to accomplish your goals.
To borrow an old saying, you want your approach to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This means moving in a new direction using a phased delivery that allows existing work or research to continue without interruption.
With Globus, this is achieved by creating an additional layer atop existing resources. A common security platform is built on local security layers. A common job submission mechanism replaces product specific ones. A monitoring system that can aggregate information from multiple sources replaces those that only report data from their specific resource.
With these steps in place, new users, applications and clusters can be provisioned in ways that allow flexible cluster usage, better aggregate throughput and higher cluster utilization rates. Then, as time permits, existing applications -- and particularly scripts and workflows -- can be ported from their existing platform to interfaces that will allow them to utilize all the bandwidth available in the organization. Dig?
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