Wednesday March 10, 1999
4:10-5:00pm
Room 124, H.R. Bright Building
"Computational Grids" are comprised of distributed computational sites, remote instruments, data archives, networks, and other resources. Grids are becoming increasingly important and prevalent as a platform for computation. However, application performance is often difficult to achieve on Grids: resources are heterogeneous, reside in distinct administrative domains, and are shared by other applications which cause the deliverable performance of these resources to change dynamically. Achieving application performance in this environment is challenging, and requires careful scheduling and adaptation to the dynamic performance fluctuations of all relevant Grid resources.
AppLeS (Application-Level Scheduler) is a project whose goal is to develop and deploy custom performance-oriented application schedulers for individual Grid and cluster applications, as well as scheduling templates for common classes of Grid and cluster applications. In this talk, we give a progress report on the AppLeS project. We focus on the principles underlying the AppLeS approach, current AppLeS projects, and challenges which must be addressed in order to achieve application performance on the Computational Grid.
Francine Berman is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at U. C. San Diego, Senior Fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and founder of the Parallel Computation Laboratory at UCSD. Over the last two decades, her research has focused on parallel processing, in particular software tools, programming environments, and prediction models. Her current research focuses on the development of strategies for achieving application performance in parallel, distributed "Grid" environments. Dr. Berman and University of Tennessee professor Rich Wolski currently co-lead the AppLeS project which focuses on the development of agents for scheduling high-performance distributed applications.
Dr. Berman has served on numerous editorial boards, and program and conference committees in the areas of parallel computing and Grid Computing. She is currently Program Co-Chair of the 1999 High Performance Distributed Computing Conference (HPDC) and Program Chair of the 2000 Merged International Parallel Processing Symposium and Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing (IPPS/SPDP). In addition, she is involved in the Metasystems Thrust of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) where she provides leadership in application scheduling issues.