Virtual Computing Environments for Problem Solving on Grids

The HEAVEN project aims to create a European advanced services platform offering a multipurpose hosting of operational applications in research, science, business and community services. Usually, grids provide sophisticated interfaces to distributed resources management as well as application execution and monitoring in wide and local area networks. These networks may connect thousands of computers by high-speed of up to 40 Gigabits/sec links. The computing resources include nodes made of thousands of processors, and terabytes of storage media. In order to use them, the state-of-the-art in grid computing requires the deployment of complex software tools and environments which are usually not accessible to end-users, i.e. application field experts. They must call for the support and expertise of highly skilled software engineers to deploy, execute and maintain the computing environments. The ultimate goal of the HEAVEN upperware is to make these computing environments transparent to the application users by providing them a high-level interface to: define their required computing environment, in terms of computing and storage resources specify the applications deployment on these resources execute and monitor the applications Along the line of the strategic objective “Grid-based systems for complex problem solving”, it is an R&D project in the field of “Enabling Application Technologies” based on grid infrastructures, although it is not a grid by itself. It is intended to enable the creation of “virtual processing systems” of any configuration by all users that are able to manipulate a suitable high-level description language. Thus it will be possible to command a grid infrastructure to mimic any type of processing system. This could become the basis for a future generalised service allowing the integration of all kinds of services without the need to deploy any specific infrastructure: it is a “virtual platform” concept. The approach relies therefore on a seamless integration and cross-fertilization of the technology-push and application-pull paradigms. HEAVEN is the missing upperware layer between the middleware grid services and the users’ applications (Figure 3). It will enable: user communities to implement unlimited and extendable sets of services at marginal cost exploit the huge amounts of existing data to provide the users with sophisticated information and services without having to manipulate the original data