GoDIET: A Deployment Tool for Distributed Middleware on Grid'5000

In this article we present GoDIET, a tool for the configuration, launch, and management of the Distributed Interactive Engineering Toolbox (DIET) on computational grids. DIET is an Application Service Provider (ASP) platform providing remote execution of computational problems on distributed resources. GoDIET automatically generates and stages all necessary configuration files, launches agents and servers in appropriate hierarchical order, reports feedback on the status of running components, and allows shutdown of all launched software. GoDIET requires an XML file describing available compute and storage resources and the desired overlay of DIET agents and servers onto available resources. For homogeneous clusters, the XML file can be generated according to a deployment planning model, which has shown that an optimal DIET deployment on homogeneous clusters is a Complete Spanning $d$-ary (CSD) tree, where $d$ is the number of children directly attached to an agent, regardless of whether the children are servers or agents. We present experiments, that permit the evaluation of the performance of GoDIET for several launch and management approaches, that verify the correctness of the deployed platform, and that test the performance of CSD tree deployments optimized for uniform workloads under mixed workload scenarios.