The French aci grid* initiative and its latest achievements using Grid'5000

The French ACI GRID* initiative and its latest achievements using Grid'5000

• Thierry PRIOL

• Director of the French ACI GRID

• [e-mail]

• Franck Cappello

• Director ACI GRID Grid’5000

• [e-mail]

Objectives of the ACI GRID

• Push the national research effort on grid computing

• Increase the visibility of French Grid research activities

• Fund medium and long term research activities in Grid using a bottom-up approach (nothing imposed !)

• Stimulate synergies between research groups

• Encourage experimentations with the available grid infrastructure being deployed through national projects

• Develop new software for experimental grid infrastructures

• New system and programming environments for distributed computing or large data management

Organisation

• Programme Director : Thierry Priol

• since January 2004, M. Cosnard before

• Scientific council : Brigitte Plateau

• Budget: ~8 M€* (including 8 PhD grants)

• This is incentive funding (around 98.3 M€ estimated by GridCoord)

Several kinds of projects

• Multidisciplinary project

• Software project

• Young research team 

• Collaboration 

• International

• Testbed

ACI GRID projects

• Middleware, tools, environments

• CGP2P (F. Cappello, LRI/CNRS)
• ASP (F. Desprez, ENS Lyon/INRIA)
• EPSN (O. Coulaud, INRIA)
• PADOUE (A. Doucet, LIP6)
• MEDIAGRID (C. Collet, IMAG)
• DARTS (S. Frénot, INSA-Lyon)
• Grid-TLSE (M. Dayde, ENSEEIHT)
• RMI (C. Pérez, IRISA)
• CONCERTO (Y. Maheo, VALORIA)
• CARAML (G. Hains, LIFO)

• Algorithms

• TAG (S. Genaud, LSIIT)
• ANCG (N. Emad, PRISM)
• DOC-G (V-D. Cung, UVSQ)

• Compiler techniques

• Métacompil (G-A. Silbert, ENMP)

• Networks and communication

• RESAM (C. Pham, ENS Lyon)
• ALTA (C. Pérez, IRISA/INRIA)

GRID ASP: Client/Server Approach for Simulation over the Grid

• Call 1 (2001 - 2003)

• Project coordinator: F. Desprez

• E-mail : [e-mail]
• Web: http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/ASP/

• Participants

• ENS-Lyon, INRIA, LORIA, LIFC, IRCOM, LST, SRSMC, Physique Lyon1

• Objectives

• Building a portable set of tools for computational servers in a ASP (Application Service Provider) model
• DIET (Distributed Interactive Engineering Toolbox)
• Porting several different applications
• physic, geology, chemistry, electronic device simulation, robotics, …
• Focus on issues
• resource localization (hierarchical) scheduling, performance evaluation (both static and dynamic), data persistence, data redistribution between servers
• Clients
• C, C++, Scilab, Web browser

TLSE : Web expert site for sparse matrices based on grid infrastructure

• Call 2 (2002 - 2004)

• Project coordinator: Michel Daydé

• E-mail : [e-mail]
• Web: http://www.enseeiht.fr/lima/tlse/

• Participants

• CERFACS, FéRIA-IRIT, LIP-ENSL, LaBRI, CEA, CNES, EADS, EDF, IFP

• Objectives

• Design a Web expertise site for sparse matrices
• Dissemination of our expertise in sparse linear algebra
• Easy access and experimentation with software and tools: only statistics are provided, not computing resources
• Exploitation of the computing power of the grid for parametric studies
• Contents : Sparse matrix software, Bibliography, Collections of sparse matrices

CGP2P: Global P2P Computing “Fusion of Desktop Grid and P2P systems”

• Call 1 (2001 - 2003)

• Coordinator: Franck Cappello,

• email: [e-mail]
• Web: www.lri.fr/~fci

• Participants: LRI, LIFL, ID IMAG, LARIA, LAL, EADS

RMI: Programming the Grid with distributed Objects

• Call 1 (2001 - 2003)

• Project coordinator: C. Pérez

• E-mail : [e-mail]
• Web: http://www.irisa.fr/Grid-RMI/en/

• Participants

• IRISA, ENS-Lyon, LIFL, INRIA, EADS

• Objectives

• Provide a framework to combine various communication middleware and runtimes
• For parallel programming:
• Message based runtimes (MPI, PVM, …)
• DSM-based runtimes (TreadMarks, …)
• For distributed programming
• RPC/RMI based middleware (DCE, CORBA, Java)
• Middleware for discrete-event based simulation (HLA)
• Get the maximum performance from the network!
• Offer zero-copy mechanism to middleware/runtime

HydroGrid: distributed code coupling in hydrogeology, using software components

• Call 2 (2002 - 2004)

• Project coordinator: M. Kern

• E-mail : [e-mail]
• Web:http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~kern/ HydroGrid/HydroGrid-en.html.
• Participants: INRIA Rocquencourt, INRIA Rennes, IMFS Strasbourg, Geosciences Rennes

• Objectives

• Simulate flow and transport of pollutants in the subsurface
• Take into account couplings between different physical phenomena
• Couple parallel codes on a grid, software from ACI GRID RMI project
• Links between numerical and software coupling
• Example applications: reactive transport (top), density driven flow (bottom), fractured media

Main feedback from call1 & call2 projects

• Lack of a large scale testbed available for experiments

• Several small scale testbeds at the regional level
• Duplication of effort when setting up testbeds

• Various type of Grids

• Need to be able to experiment various software layers

• Incompatible with a production Grid

How to proceed…

The Grid’5000 project

Grid’5000 Objective

• Deploy an experimental large scale computing infrastructure to allow any kind of experiments

• Experiments of any kind of grids (Virtual Supercomputer, Desktop Grid, …)

• Experimental conditions
• Configuration of the entire software stack
• from the application to the operating system

The Grid’5000 Project

• Building a nation wide experimental platform for Large scale Grid & P2P experiments

• 9 geographically distributed sites
• Every site hosts a cluster (from 256 CPUs to 1K CPUs)
• All sites are connected by RENATER (French Res. and Edu. Net.)
• RENATER hosts probes to trace network load conditions
• Design and develop a system/middleware environment for safely test and repeat experiments

• Use the platform for Grid experiments in real life conditions

• Port and test applications, develop new algorithms
• Address critical issues of Grid system/middleware:
• Programming, Scalability, Fault Tolerance, Scheduling
• Address critical issues of Grid Networking
• High performance transport protocols, Qos
• Investigate original mechanisms
• P2P resources discovery, Desktop Grids

Planning

Grid’5000 foundations: Measurements and condition injection

• Quantitative metrics :

• Performance: Execution time, throughput, overhead, QoS (Batch, interactive, soft real time, real time).
• Scalability:Resource occupation (CPU, memory, disc, network), Applications algorithms, Number of users, Number of resources.
• Fault-tolerance:Tolerance to very frequent failures (volatility), tolerance to massive failures (a large fraction of the system disconnects), Fault tolerance consistency across the software stack.

• Experimental Condition injection :

• Background workloads: CPU, Memory, Disk, network, Traffic injection at the network edges.
• Stress: high number of clients, servers, tasks, data transfers,
• Perturbation: artificial faults (crash, intermittent failure, memory corruptions, Byzantine), rapid platform reduction/increase, slowdowns, etc.

Grid’5000 principle: A highly reconfigurable experimental platform

Experiment workflow

Grid’5000 map

Hardware Configuration

Grid’5000 network provided by RENATER

Grid’5000 as an Instrument

• A high security for Grid’5000 and the Internet, despite the deep reconfiguration feature

• Grid’5000 is confined: communications between sites are isolated from the Internet and Vice versa (level2 MPLS, Dedicated lambda).

• A software infrastructure allowing users to access Grid’5000 from any Grid’5000 site and have simple view of the system

• A user has a single account on Grid’5000, Grid’5000 is seen as a cluster of clusters, 9 (1 per site) unsynchronized home directories

• A reservation/scheduling tools allowing users to select nodes and schedule experiments

• a reservation engine + batch scheduler (1 per site) + OAR Grid (a co-reservation scheduling system)

• A user toolkit to reconfigure the nodes software image deployment and node reconfiguration tool

OS Reconfiguration techniques Reboot OR Virtual Machines

Community: Grid’5000 users

About 230+ Experiments

About 200 Publications

A series of Events

Grid@work (Octobre 10-14 2005)

Experiment: Geophysics: Seismic Ray Tracing in 3D mesh of the Earth

Jxta DHT scalability

Fully Distributed Batch Scheduler

• Motivation : evaluation of a fully distributed resource allocation service (batch scheduler)

• Vigne : Unstructured network, flooding (random walk optimized for scheduling).

• Experiment: a bag of 944 homogeneous tasks / 944 CPU

• Synthetic sequential code (monte carlo application).
• Measure of the mean execution time for a task (computation time depends on the resource)
• Measure the overhead compared with an ideal execution (central coordinator)
• Objective: 1 task per CPU.

• Tested configuration:

• Result :

Large Scale experiment of DIET: A GridRPC environment

Solving the Flow-Shop Scheduling Problem

TCP limits over 10Gb/s links

• Highlighting TCP stream interaction issues in very high bandwidth links (congestion colapse) and poor bandwidth fairness

• Grid’5000 10Gb/s connections evaluation

• Evaluation of TCP variants over Grid’5000 10Gb/s links (BIC TCP, H-TCP, weswood…)

Grid’5000 main achievements in 2006

• A large scale and highly reconfigurable Grid experimental platform

• Used by Master student Ph. D., PostDoc and researchers (and results are presented in their reports, thesis, papers, etc.)

• Grid’5000 offers in 2006:

• 9 clusters distributed over 9 sites in France,
• about 10 Gigabit/s (directional) of bandwidth
• the capability for all users to reconfigure the platform [protocols/OS/Middleware/Runtime/Application]

• Grid’5000 results in 2006:

• 300+ users
• ~200 publications,
• ~230 planned experiments

• Grid’5000 is opened to French Grid researchers since July 2005

• Grid’5000 is opened to others communities in 2006 (CoreGRID)

• Grid’5000 winter school (Philippe d’Anfray, ~January 2007)

• Connection to other Grid experimental platforms

• Netherlands (from October 2006), Japan (under discussion)

• Sustainability ensured by INRIA after 2007

Concluding remarks

• GRID in its wider definition

• Computing, data and knowledge Grids, P2P
• Not only focusing on the use of Supercomputers… neither on Globus…
• An emphasis on middleware but also on applications/algorithms to make them Grid-aware

• The French ACI GRID lead to many European initiatives

• Several groups of the ACI GRID projects are involved in EU funded projects (almost absent in FP5, involved in 10 projects in FP6 and leader of 3 projects)
• The idea to set up a Network of Excellence in Grid Research came from the ACI GRID (M. Cosnard)
• On-going discussions to have a European dimension of Grid’5000 funded under the 7th Framework Programme

• Funding of Grid research yet available

• Through the “Agence National de la Recherche”

• To get more information about the ACI-GRID

• http://www-sop.inria.fr/aci/grid
• [e-mail]

Announcement Project consultation Meeting