National Grid Seminar Series
Jointly organized with HP Singapore

Grid - The Real Thing
Dr. Dejan Milojicic
(HP Labs, Palo Alto)

The Microgrid: Enabling Scientific Study of Dynamic Grid Behavior
Dr. Andrew Chien
(University of California, San Diego)

10 November 2003 (Monday)
0900 hours @ Auditorium
Institute for Infocomm Research
21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore 119613

Abstract for “Grid – The Real Thing”

The Grid technology vision holds big promises in terms of rendering almost anything in IT as a Grid service. However the current Grid technology is over-hyped and over-promised. There are few deployed and used Grids in the world today. The real hard problems are not addressed, leading to even lesser industrial and academic adoption of the Grid. This talk focuses on the hard problems in the Grid and how HP technology addresses them. In particular, we describe four distinct technology efforts: Utility Data Center (UDC), Grid Topology Designer, SmartFrog, and Web Services Management Framework. We provide the working demo examples of: secure provisioning of the resources in the data center; provisioning resources across data centers; deployment and adaptive behavior of the Grid services; and the management of Grid services. By addressing practical problems of IT technology in an open and standard way, we believe that we are moving the Grid technology toward a broader adoption.

Biodata

Dejan Milojicic is a senior scientist and a project manager at HP Labs. He has worked in operating systems and distributed systems for more than 20 years. He was the program chair of the IEEE Agent Systems and Applications Symposium (ASA/MA'99) and of the first USENIX Workshop on Industrial Experiences with System Software (WIESS'2000), as well as on various editorial boards and program committees. Dr. Milojicic published in many journals and at various events. He has been engaged in a number of standardization efforts, such as OMG MASIF and SmartFrog configuration framework at GGF. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and USENIX. He received his BSc and MSc from University of Belgrade, Serbia, and his PhD from University of Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Abstract for “The Microgrid – Enabling Scientific Study of Dynamic Grid Behavior”

A fundamental property of Grids is the dynamic sharing of resources, and the adaptation of application behavior in resource use to dynamic attributes of the resource environment. Such dynamism poses interesting challenges in communication, resource scheduling, and system stability.

To study network, compute resource, and application properties in support of developing appropriate protocols, we have designed, built, and validated a set of grid modeling tools called the MicroGrid. These tools enable entire, unmodified Grid applications to be run against arbitrary network, compute, and storage resource environments, enabling study of these issues of dynamism software in a broad and thorough fashion. We describe the design of the MicroGrid system, its capabilities, and how we solved a number of interesting challenges in its design, including resource virtualization, scalable network emulation, and background workload generation. We describe some studies which use the MicroGrid to study the behavior of dynamic Grid applications and Grid resources.

The MicroGrid is part of the NSF NGS funded Grid Application Development Software (GRADS) research project.

Biodata

Andrew Chien is Director of the newly established UCSD Center for Networked Systems. Prof. Chien's research expertise includes networking, Grids, high performance clusters, distributed systems, computer architecture, high-speed routing networks, compilers, and object-oriented programming languages. His research activities include his role as chief software architect for the Cal-(IT)² "OptIPuter" project and participation in the Grid Application Development System project.

Chien has published more than 120 technical papers and has received numerous awards including a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, a Xerox Excellence in Research Award, and best paper awards.

Chien joined UCSD in 1998, where he is the SAIC Chair Professor in Computer Science and Engineering. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1990 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also earned his MS and BS degrees. From 1990 to 1998, Chien was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He is also associated with the UCSD Center for Wireless Communications and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Chien serves in numerous professional leadership roles including the ACM SIGPLAN, IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems, Global Grid Forum, and the NSF Teragrid. In 1999, he co-founded Entropia, Inc., an enterprise desktop Grid company.

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This seminar series is organized by the National Grid Office located at 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore 119613.

Admission is Free. All are Welcome.
Please register a place by 1000 hours on 7 November 2003 via
http://h50096.www5.hp.com/esgcamp/image/oct03/grid/index.html