GILDA

Grid INFN Virtual Laboratory for Dissemination Activities

Roberto Barbera

1,2

, Leandro N. Ciuffo

, Emidio Giorgio

Antonio Calanducci

and Valeria Ardizzone

Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sez. di Catania, Via S. Sofia 64 – 95123, Catania, Italy

Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia dell’Università di Catania, Via S. Sofia 64 – 95123, Catania, Italy

Keywords: Grid computing, Training, Virtual Laboratory, gLite, e-infrastructure.

Abstract: The Grid INFN virtual Laboratory for Dissemination Activities (GILDA) is a fully fledged Grid test-bed

devoted to training and outreach activities. Open to anyone who wants to have its first hands-on experience

with grid systems, GILDA has been adopted as the official training infrastructure by many Grid projects all

around the world. All services, tools and materials produced in the past tutorials can be freely used by

anyone who wants to learn and teach Grid technology. Additionally, through a set of applications ported on

its Grid Infrastructure, developers can identify components and learn by examples how to “gridify” their

applications. This work presents the main features of such training infrastructure.

1 INTRODUCTION

Launched in 2004 by the Italian National Institute

for Nuclear Physics (INFN), GILDA (the Grid INFN

virtual Laboratory for Dissemination Activities) is a

fully fledged Grid test-bed devoted to dissemination

activities. This infrastructure is open to anyone who

wants to have its first hands-on experience with Grid

systems. Actually, GILDA can be an important tool

for at least three main categories of users:

1. Grid newcomers – people willing to start

learning how to use a grid infrastructure;

2. Grid application developers – Just like

"webifying" applications to run on a web

browser, grid users need to "gridify" their

applications to run on a Grid. Through a set of

applications ported on GILDA, developers can

identify components and learn by examples how

to “gridify” their own applications;

3. Tutors – GILDA has been developed keeping

training and education in mind. Thus, all

services, tools and materials produced in the past

tutorials can be freely used by anyone who wants

to learn or teach Grid technology.

Indeed, GILDA has been adopted as the official

training platform by several former and current Grid

projects, such as EGEE/EGEE-II/EGEE-III

(www.eu-egee.org), EELA/EELA-2 (www.eu-

eela.eu), EU-IndiaGRID (www.euindiagrid.org),

EUMEDGRID (www.eumedgrid.org),

EUChinaGRID (www.euchinagrid.org), ICEAGE

(www.iceage-eu.org), OMII-EU (http://omii-

europe.org), BEinGRID (www.beingrid.eu) and

many others, becoming a "de facto" standard

training-Infrastructure (referred hereafter as t-

infrastructure) in Europe and in several other parts

of the world for dissemination of Grid Computing

technology.

GILDA objectives can be summarized as

follows: (i) to raise awareness of Grid Computing

benefits; (ii) to provide customized formats for

dissemination events, according to the skills of

attendants; (iii) to facilitate appropriate free on-line

content and services for training purposes; and (iv)

to encourage the use of a complete t-infrastructure

by new communities.

This article aims at presenting an overview of

GILDA facilities as well as to invite the reader to try

such t-infrastructure.

2 BACKGROUND

Computational and storage limitations are key issues

for organizations that depend on computation-

intensive applications. Such organizations are

frequently affected by market pressures to reduce

deployment time and maintenance costs. Hence,

273

Barbera R., N. Ciuffo L., Giorgio E., Calanducci A. and Ardizzone V. (2009).

GILDA - Grid INFN Virtual Laboratory for Dissemination Activities.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 273-278

DOI: 10.5220/0001963402730278

 SciTePress

they may be looking for ways to improve the

effectiveness of their infrastructure or their business

processes through transformation, or seeking

opportunities for innovation that will benefit the

business. Grid is not the answer by itself, but in

many of these cases, it can certainly play an

important role, allowing immediate productivity and

benefits and giving more choices and control on how

to purchase and leverage IT power for competitive

advantage. The Grid vision is to expand parallel and

distributed computation, providing a virtualization

of heterogeneous compute and data resources,

supporting security policy based resource allocation

and prioritization. The Grid is ideal for any

applications requiring excellent performance and

scalability for their compute-intensive processes

(e.g., Monte Carlo simulation, engineering CAD

simulations, protein modeling, 3D rendering,

computational archaeology investigations, etc.).

In this context, the GILDA Project was born with

the aim of offering a one-of-a-kind service for those

interested in testing the Grid, using gLite (2008) and

the EGEE infrastructure with their own systems.

GILDA offers either basic experiences through the

“Try the Grid” (EGEE, 2006) walkthrough in

minutes or intensive and in-depth training by helping

users willing to develop applications to be ported

into a Grid environment.

3 DISSEMINATION TOOLS

The main objectives of GILDA activity around the

world are to encourage and help new and existing

communities to support them for improvement or

migration of their applications to Grid

infrastructures, to accelerate the adoption of Grid

technologies, and to increase the satisfaction of

those currently using the Grid services through the

communities’ feedback. Training activities are a key

component of the knowledge dissemination process,

ensuring that all users fully understand the

characteristics of the offered Grid services and that

they have enough expertise to properly use the

available Grid infrastructure. In order to achieve the

main objectives, several dissemination instruments

are used. A brief description of these instruments is

presented below.

3.1 Tutorials for Applications

Developers

Porting an application into a Grid environment has

never been an easy task. In order to enable

application developers to get used to the main Grid

functionalities, an advanced tutorial has been created

fully dedicated to teach them how to “gridify” their

applications. Such training events are the perfect

scenario to put application experts in tight

collaboration with Grid experts.

Hence, the GILDA Team has acquired a good

experience in transferring knowledge and know-how

to new communities by helping them to integrate

their applications into several Grid projects’

infrastructures.

3.2 Tutorials for Sysadmin

Tutorials for grid system administrators are

organized by the GILDA Team to meet the needs of

computer centers interested in joining the GILDA

test-bed or other Grid infrastructures. It is also worth

mentioning that it is possible to have your own

GILDA-like stand-alone Grid installed in your

institution. In fact, it is a common practice adopted

to support the organization of long training events,

such as Grid Schools or graduation courses.

Usually, for a novice user, installing a new Grid

service and configuring it properly are not

straightforward tasks. In that scenario, a step-by-step

guide is desired to help user during the

troubleshooting stage. The appropriate

documentation on site installation can be found at

(GILDA, 2004d).

The sysadmin tutorials are divided into three

parts: a theoretical part, a practical one and the

hands-on section. In each presentation, the GILDA

tutors use slides to show the main steps necessary to

install and configure a Grid element. Then, in the

hands-on section all participants try to install a Grid

element by themselves, assisted by tutors.

Training material is composed of multimedia

slides, a Wiki website and a set of "Virtual

Services", detailed below.

The most important stage during the preparation

of a tutorial is to set up the machines used for the

grid node installation: to make it easy, a

virtualization technique such as VMware® is

adopted in all organized tutorials. In this way, all

participants have their own Virtual Machines on

which they can work with minimum efforts required

from the system administrators.

3.3 GILDA Wiki

The GILDA Wiki (2008) has been created mainly

with the purpose of documenting and organizing the

huge amount of training material produced so far. Its

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contents are freely available on the Web for every

interested user.

Moreover, this site is not a simple on-line

documentation repository, but an important

collaborative tool used by the whole project team.

Thus, all registered user can contribute feeding the

site with useful additional training material.

The Wiki site is an information source for three

target audiences: users, site administrators and

application developers. Regarding the users’ content,

the available material is subdivided into three

different complexity levels (Basic, Medium and

Advanced), while the site administrators area

consists in step-by-step procedures to install and

configure Grid services. Finally, the developers

section presents the middleware functionalities that

can be integrated into the source code using the API.

3.4 Support System

Through a ticket-based support system (GILDA,

2004a), users can send their questions to the GILDA

Team and get customized answers to their issues.

The GILDA support system is an important

communication tool aimed at helping anyone facing

problems on using or installing a GILDA site.

3.5 Virtual Services

Through the use of the virtualization technique, it is

possible to carry out all Grid elements. This

instrument has many benefits, such as increasing

services’ portability and reducing both the time to

put a site in operation and the number of real

machines required. The complete list of available

virtual services is available at (GILDA, 2004b).

4 THE GILDA STACK

Four main layers can be identified in the GILDA

environment, as depicted in Figure 1. At the lowest

level, dedicated hardware resources, such as

computers and digital networks running the required

operating systems and protocols, as well as local

resources, which can be either physical or virtual,

such as emulations of computers and operating

systems on which a Grid is to be built. At the second

level resources are made accessible by software

services (middleware, databases, APIs, course-

specific applications). At the third level, guides and

cookbooks suggesting how to build the t-

Infrastructure such that everyone can replicate it if

he/she wishes or needs it.

Finally, on top there should be matching

compositions of: rubrics and instruction texts,

example data sets modified in scale and content to

suit educational goals and data use policies,

exemplar applications, problem sets, software to

support exercises, and everything which makes the

infrastructure profitable by students.

Figure 1: The GILDA stack.

5 THE GILDA TEST-BED

The GILDA test-bed is maintained on a “best-effort”

basis. The computational resources usually comes

from institutions located in Europe, Asia or Latin

America. Therefore new grid sites, using

heterogeneous hardware, are frequently joining the t-

Infrastructure, just like a “real world” Grid

environment.

The test-bed itself is made up of all the

components of a larger real Grid infrastructure,

including services, resources and monitoring tools.

To allow the use of the test-bed, it also features a

Virtual Organization (VO) and a real Certification

Authority (CA) that grants two-week certificates for

the test use of the GILDA infrastructure. In addition,

it runs the latest production (and stable) version of

the gLite middleware (2008) developed in the

context of the EGEE project.

In order to ease the access to its infrastructure,

GILDA also provides a grid portal called GENIUS

(GILDA,2004c), where different usages are

supplied, such as basic content for novice users and

full featured ones for more in depth tutorials and

demonstrations. At a more advanced level, GILDA

offers a one-of-a-kind service for those interested in

testing the Grid and gLite with their own software,

offering a more intensive and in-depth introduction

to the Grid. In a couple of weeks, an user can be

trained in Grid usage, his/her software can be

modified in order to run on the Grid environment

and finally, a GENIUS service can be created to

increase the visibility of the work that has been

done.

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6 VIRTUOUS CYCLE

By its nature, GILDA is one of the key enablers of

the “virtuous cycle” to attract and support new

communities. Its workflow, depicted in Figure 2, is

described a below:

1. Driven either by the dissemination events or

scientific papers where GILDA is cited, a novice

user can get the feeling of what Grid Computing

is and which kind of applications can run on a

Grid infrastructure by exploring the GILDA web

portal or using the Grid Demonstrator interface

(GILDA,2006).

2. Following up the dissemination activities,

institutions usually request the organization of

Grid training events based on the GILDA t-

infrastructure. An interested user, participating

in such tutorial or induction course, can go

through all the mandatory procedure of the

request of a personal digital certificate and

subscription to a Virtual Organization and then

use the Grid Tutor machine (GILDA,2004c);

3. After participating in a training event or even

doing self-training by following the GILDA wiki

pages, many users try to port their own

applications on the test-bed. In a smaller scale,

these users will face all problems of interfacing

the Grid services available before entering in a

huge production quality e-Science infrastructure;

4. Various applications from different communities

ported on GILDA can be either deployed on

large e-Infrastructures or incorporated into the

Grid Demonstrator, enriching the portfolio of

examples that can be demonstrated to new

people.

Figure 2: “Virtuous cycle” of applications on GILDA.

7 APPLICATIONS

The Grid environment requires many new skills both

for scientists that need to learn how to work on it

and for application developers that have to learn

how to write and optimize codes to properly interact

with the available Grid services and computational

resources. As a consequence, disciplinary support is

also essential to carry out Grid knowledge

management and Grid education, both generic and

towards specific application domains. In GILDA a

set of "Case Studies" of integrated applications has

been created, so that scientist or software developers

can explore and compare different approaches for

the integration process of their application on a Grid

infrastructure.

Currently, GILDA applications portfolio covers a

large range of different research domains. A short

list of applications successfully ported into GILDA

test-bed is presented below.

7.1 GATE

Gate is a C++ platform based on the Monte Carlo

Geant4 toolkit (CIRRONE,2005). It has been

designed to model nuclear medicine applications,

such as PET (Positron Emission Tomography) and

SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed

Tomography) in the context of the OpenGATE

collaboration (GATE). Its functionalities combined

to its ease-of-use make this platform also impressive

for radiotherapy and brachytherapy treatment

planning.

7.2 Hadron Therapy

HadronTherapy simulates the beam line and

particles detectors used in the proton-therapy facility

CATANA (Centro di AdroTerapia e Applicazioni

Nucleari Avanzate), operational at INFN-LNS.

Here, a 62 MeV (62 million of electron volts) proton

beam, accelerated by a superconducting cyclotron, is

used for the treatment of some kind of eye cancer.

7.3 gMOD

gMOD is a new application offering a content-on-

demand service. A user can browse a catalog of

multimedia contents and request one to be streamed

in real time to his/her workstation using the power of

the Grid. Movies can also be chosen by querying an

underlying metadata catalog using one or more

attributes. The role feature of the Virtual

Organization Membership Services (VOMS) is

exploited to define normal users and catalog

managers. gMOD represents a very interesting use

case for the use of Grid both in entertainment and

distributed digital content management systems such

as the e-learning ones.

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7.4 Volcano Sonification

Current knowledge of volcanic eruptions does not

yet allow scientists to predict future eruptions. This

application represents an attempt to put the scientific

community one step closer to the prediction asset by

means of the sonification of volcano seismograms.

Thus, the translation of the patterns of Mount Etna

(Italy) and Mount Tungurahua (Ecuador) volcanic

behaviors into sound waves has been carried.

Data sonification is currently used in several fields

and for different purposes: science and engineering,

education and training. It acts mainly as data

analysis and interpretation tool. Figure 3 illustrates

its working scheme.

Figure 3: Volcano Sonification – input / output scheme.

8 FORTHCOMING FEATURES

The t-infrastructure provided by GILDA will be

continuously used by many EU funded projects,

since several project proposals submitted to the 7th

Framework Programme calls expressed their

intention to use GILDA facilities as part of their

training program.

The GILDA hardware expansion plan foreseen

the integration of new 64-bits worker nodes by the

end of 2008 (up to now, only 32-bits nodes are

available). This will lead the availability of new

libraries often requested by application developers

and the general industry community such as MPI-2.

Additionally, the growing number of users has

encouraged the GILDA team to recently announce

the incorporation of some new features. These

features are:

8.1 gLibrary

gLibrary (CALANDUCCI,2007) an extensible,

robust, secure and easy-to-use system to handle

digital libraries in a Grid infrastructure. It offers an

intuitive Web interface to browse the available

entries, and thanks to its powerful “iTunes-like”

searching capabilities based on attribute filters,

finding a library asset is just a matter of seconds.

gLibrary is a flexible system that can be used for

different purposes and for different communities that

can easily adopt this framework to build their own

digital libraries defining types and categories

according to their needs.

8.2 Secure Storage Service

This service was carried out by UNICO S.r.l.

(http://www.unicosrl.it) in close collaboration with

INFN in the context of the TriGrid VL Project

(http://www.trigrid.it). This service provides the

users with a set of tools for storing confidential data

(e.g., medical or financial data) in a secure way and

in an encrypted format on the Grid storage elements.

The data stored in this way are accessible and

readable by authorized users only. Moreover, it

solves the insider abuse problem preventing also the

administrators of the storage elements from

accessing the confidential data in a clear format.

8.3 GRelC

The Grid Database Access Service (GRelC) (2007)

aims to provide a set of advanced data grid service

to transparently, efficiently and securely manage

databases in a Grid environment (FIORE,2007).

This framework, developed by University of Lecce –

Italy and SPACI Consortium (The Italian Southern

Partnership for Advanced Computational

Infrastructures), is currently used to support

bioinformatics experiments on distributed and huge

data banks. The framework provides a uniform

access interface to access and interact with

heterogeneous DBMS such us PostgreSQL, MySQL,

Oracle, DB2, SQLite, etc.

9 CONCLUSIONS

GILDA represents a very valuable tool in the Italian

INFN Grid Project (http://grid.infn.it) as well as in

several Grid projects around the world. Indeed, its t-

infrastructure has been used so far in more than 300

induction courses in 53 different countries all over

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the world. Altogether, more than 13000 certificates

were issued by the GILDA Certification Authority,

and at the time this article was written, more than a

thousand users were currently registered with the

GILDA Virtual Organization.

Through GILDA a broad range of users are able

to get quick and easy access to a “real world” Grid

environment. Furthermore, GILDA facilities are

open to any organizations or educational institutions

who want to adopt it in their Grid training programs.

In that sense, the main business benefits of adopting

GILDA can be summarized as follows:

1. It is free;

2. No costs to leverage Grid resources are required

to use it;

3. It is the first place where a user can takes

experience on Grid Computing;

4. It provides an affordable and pleasant experience

in Grid training;

5. It provides a good infrastructure where business

applications can try “gridifying” operation

exploiting the GILDA Team support.

6. It improves local research activity quality

providing more power computation and storage

resources;

7. It contributes to promote international

cooperation and partnership.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The GILDA Team would like to thank all the

partners (project and institutions) that collaborate on

proving resources, contents, services and human

effort to this project.

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