Indiana University Bloomington

Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

Technical Report TR681:
"Sigiri: Towards A Light-Weight Job Management System for Large Scale Systems"

Eran Chinthaka, Suresh Marru, and Beth Plale
(Aug 2009), 5 Pages pages
Abstract:
e-Science applications are often compute and data intensive, requiring large-scale compute systems for execution. Large-scale systems, however, support a variety of resource management interfaces that an end user must adapt to for compute job submission and management. Grid\cite{grid} middleware solutions abstract these heterogeneous resource managers and offer a single unified job management interface. However, Grid middleware tends to be highly complex, needing technically sophisticated system administration skills to deploy and maintain these services. Further, many clusters in the academic setting are not part of a larger scale grid and have to be directly accessed by non-uniform vendor specific resource managers. With the goals of providing a simple, reliable and highly scalable uniform job management, we introduce Sigiri, a light-weight job management and abstraction service. Sigiri supports existing popular job specifications like JSDL and RSL. A Web Service Interface is provided to easily integrate with various scientific systems and each step in job submission and management is decoupled to increase scalability. In this paper, we discuss Sigiri architecture, its simplicity and experiences with incorporating academic research clusters (managed by part-time system administrators) into large-scale escience systems.

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