Building Computational Grids with Apple’s Xgrid Middleware

Slide 1: Building Computational Grids with Apple’s Xgrid Middleware Baden Hughes Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering The University of Melbourne badenh@csse.unimelb.edu.au 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 1

Slide 2: Talk Overview Introduction Xgrid History Solution Architecture Apple Native vs 3rd Party Components Production Experience Conclusions 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 2

Slide 3: Introduction In June 2005 Apple released Xgrid 1.0, a framework for loosely coupled distributed computation, specifically targets embarrasingly parallel computation Xgrid has been positioned as being highly accessible advanced computing solution for less technically oriented user communities, particularly small to medium research groups without easy access to traditional HPC environments While technically simple, from a functional perspective Xgrid blurs the distinction between HPC user and maintainer, which could engender new grass-roots research through a self-sustaining model for HPC 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 3

Slide 4: Xgrid History 1/2004 Xgrid Technical Preview 1 Proof of concept only Limited developer release 11/2004 Xgrid Technical Preview 2 Robust CLI, immature GUI Wide developer release Reasonable adoption, 3rd party tools emerge 4/2005 Xgrid 1.0 Robust CLI, GUI, API Production oriented, vendor supported release Mac OS X Server centric (somewhat controversially) 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 4

Slide 5: Xgrid Architecture Client, Controller, Agent Client User interface; controller authentication; job submission/retrieval Controller Job submission; management (aka cluster head node + some brokering) Agent Compute node (dedicated or cycle stealing; local or remote) 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 5

Slide 6: Configuration and Systems Management Integrated local client configuration via System Preferences Remote client configuration via ssh, Apple RD; Netboot etc Controller based Server Admin tools allow ‘whole of grid’ configuration (authentication methods, agent type etc) Integrated user management and authentication (Kerberos, SSO, LDAP, Active Directory) Controller discovery either specified (FQDN) or dynamic (ZeroConf, Rendezvous, Bonjour) 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 6

Slide 7: Job Specification and Management Job = 1 or more tasks Jobs described in Apple’s extensible plist format (either native plist or XML) Submission to controller via client either in serial or batch mode Controller periodically probes all registered agents to determine availability (NB currently proprietary scheduling heuristic) Asynchronous client-controller interaction model: clients can disconnect and later reconnect to retrieve completed jobs 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 7

Slide 8: Scalability Published (cluster mode) benchmarks: 128 Agents 20,000 queued jobs 100,000 tasks per job 2Gb data per job 1Gb results per task 10Gb aggregate results per job Production sites with >200 agents in distributed mode Integration with existing OS X management tools such as ARD does allow for considerable scalability 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 8

Slide 9: Apple Native Components Overview 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 9

Slide 10: Apple Native Components Detail GUI: Xgrid.app, simple user interface CLI Xgrid, batch oriented, supports multitask submission Cocoa Framework XgridFoundation, ObjC core, with PyObj access, full featured Xgrid Controller client authentication, node management, job scheduling Tiger Agent Xgrid agent for Mac OS X 10.4 nodes Panther Agent Xgrid agent for Mac OS X 10.3 nodes Network Communications Based around BEEP (IETF RFC 3080) 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 10

Slide 11: 3rd Party Components Overview 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 11

Slide 12: 3rd Party Components Detail GridStuffer OS X GUI (Cocoa) application for multi-task job submission, monitoring, retrieval PyXG Python/PyObjC-based API for Xgrid client GridBus Data Broker: data-centric brokering service with (experimental) support for Xgrid client XgridLite: functionally reduced Xgrid controller for OS X workstation platforms Xgrid Linux Agent: Linux native Xgrid agent XgridAgent-Java: Platform-independent Java-based Xgrid agent 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 12

Slide 13: Production Experience Locations Universities: Stanford, Reed, Utah, Simon Fraser, Toronto, Melbourne Numerous industrial sites Application Domains Natural language processing Modelling biochemical receptors Nonlinear computation in epidemiology Rendering animations Low autocorrelation binary sequence search Biophytonic tissue analysis 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 13

Slide 14: Conclusion Significant advantage for Xgrid is ease of administration and use; contrasts with many other cluster/grid computing middleware Some disadvantages in area integration (particularly with other middleware suites) Active 3rd party development community and open relations with Apple’s Xgrid product group have made Xgrid more compelling Some shrink-wrapped applications have Xgrid support (eg GridMathematica) Other cluster/grid computing solutions for Mac OS X exist (eg MPI, Pooch) 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 14

Slide 15: More Xgrid Info http://www.apple.com/acg/xgrid http://developer.apple.com/hardware/hpc http://www.macresearch.org 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 15

Slide 16: Acknowledgements Research supported by Apple Computer Inc, through the Apple University Consortium and the Apple University Development Fund Thanks to Ernest Prabhakar (Xgrid Product Manager) and Richard Crandall (Advanced Computation Group) from Apple for comments on an earlier version of this paper 17 January 2006 Hughes @ AusGrid 2006 16