Customized Plug-in Modules in Metascheduler CSF4 for Life Sciences Applications

摘要

As more and more life science researchers start to take ad-rnvantages of grid technologies in their work, the demand increases for a robust yet easy to use metascheduler or resource broker. In this paper, we have extended the metascheduler CSF4 by providing a Virtual Job Model (VJM) to synchronize the resource co-allocation for cross-domain parallel jobs. The VJM eliminates dead-locks and improves resource usage for multi-cluster parallel applications compiled with MPICH-G2. Taking advantage of the extensible scheduler plug-in model of CSF4, one may develop customized metascheduling policies for life sciences applications. As an example, an array-job scheduler plug-in is developed for pleasantly parallel applications such as AutoDock and Blast. The performance of the VJM is evaluated through experiments with mpiBLAST-g2 using a Gfarm data grid testbed. Furthermore, a CSF4 portlet has been released to provide a graphical user interface for transparent grid access, with the use of Gfarm for data staging and simplified data management. The platform is open source at source-forge, net/projects/gesf/ and has been deployed in life science gateways by projects such as My WorkSphere, and PRAGMA Biosciences Portal.