“HKU Grid Point” Progress Report
Nov. 28, 2004
The “HKU Grid Point” project started on Oct. 24, 2004. The System Research Group
(SRG) of HKU and the research group in NCIC are in charge of this project. During the
past two years, we made a steady progress and accomplished substantial achievement in
the project. We reports the progress the SRG have made as follows:
I. Building the Grid Platform
The SRG built the “Gideon 300 Cluster” in the end of October in 2002. The Gideon 300
Cluster consists of 300 Intel-based Legend PCs interconnected by a single, high-port
density Fast-Ethernet switch. This guarantees a one-hop latency between each node with
full connectivity. Each processing node is a standard PC which comprises an Intel
Pentium 4 processor running at 2 GHz, a 512 Mbytes (PC2100) DDR SDRAM, and a
40GB IDE hard disk. This gives the whole cluster a peak floating point performance of
1.2 Tflops (trillion floating point operations per second). The cluster has been
benchmarked according to an international standard - the High-Performance Linpack
benchmark. The Gideon 300 Cluster is ranked #175 on the TOP500 Supercomputers list
for November 2002. We installed GOS software and the portal in 32 machines of the
cluster and register the resource to the server in Computer Network Information Center.
Now the user can get the information of the resource and grid services provided by HKU
Grid Point.
II. Grid Services
Through the portal of China National Grid, users can access various grid services
provided by HKU grid point.
The following services are produced from some R&D projects carried out by our group:
 JESSICA2 service: It provides the service of parallel Java virtual machine. Users
can submit their own Java multi-thread sequential program. The multiple threads
can be distributed to multiple machines to be executed in parallel. The efficiency
is much higher than that in one single machine. The service returns the output
back to the user through the portal.
 G-JavaMPI service: It provides the JavaMPI programming and execution
environment. Users can submit their own JavaMPI programs. The service returns
the output back to the user through the portal.
The other services are produced from software released by other research groups:
 WireGL service: WireGL is a cluster rendering systems developed by Stanford
University. The software allows graphics applications to render to a cluster of
workstations outputting to a tiled display. The service provides the service of 3-D
graph or animation rendering.
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MatMPI service: It uses the software “MatlabMPI” developed by MIT which
allows any Matlab program to be run on a parallel computer and provides the
service of parallel mathematic computation.
Drug Discovery service: Our site is one of grid points of Shanghai Drug
Discovery Grid which is developed by some institutions in Shanghai. Our Gideon
cluster provides the computational resource to execute the task of drug discovery,
and returns the results to the server in Shanghai.
III. Grid R&D Projects
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G-JavaMPI: This project does research on the grid middleware providing simple
but efficient grid programming and execution environment. We inroduce a grid
middleware called G-JavaMPI, which combines a high-level message passing
interface with the Java language to support portable messaging-passing
programming in a grid. Different from traditional MPI implementations, it
supports transparent migration of MPI processes during execution. This feature
facilitates more flexible task scheduling and more effective resource sharing. The
migration mechanism is implemented by exploiting the JVM Debugger Interface
(JVMDI) functions, and minor bytecode modification. This method is portable
and does not require modification of the JVM. To guarantee continuous MPI
communication during process migration, a message redirection mechanism is
employed. Based on G-JavaMPI, we develop a BLAST application called
“JmpiBLAST” to evaluate the performance of MPI communication and process
migration. We also investigate the dynamic task scheduling algorithm for this
application and other similar applications. During runtime, when there is new
resource joining in or quitting, the algorithm calculates the new mapping of the
processes in response to the changing. The results attest to the effectiveness of the
algorithm. The detailed experimental results are reported in the published papers.
Currently G-JavaMPI and JmpiBLAST are two grid services provided in the
portal that can be accessed by the users.
G-PASS: This research focuses on providing flexible security support for mobile
agents and processes migrating frequently between organizations in grid. The
main idea includes an instance-oriented authorization mechanism and a role-based
inter-organization mapping. G-PASS simulates the custom system for
international immigration management in real world. An unforgeable document
named G-passport is proposed as the kernel of the security supporting system.
Several relative protocols are also defined. G-PASS can be an infrastructure used
in deploying the grid-based mobile applications. It is completely compatible with
the credentials and certificates in GSI, and more powerful supporting
functionality is provided. G-PASS has been configured in G-JavaMPI to support
for the authorization procedure during process migration. Experiments show that
the G-PASS works very well in the collaboration and delivers acceptable
overhead.
InstantGrid: This research proposes a framework for on-demand construction of
grid points. In contrast to traditional approaches, InstandGrid is designed to
substantially simplify software management in grid systems, and is able to
instantly turn any computer into a grid-ready platform with the desired execution
environment. We experiment on the Gideon cluster, and the results demonstrate
that a 256-node grid point with commodity grid middleware can be constructed in
five minutes from scratch. Detailed information can be found in the paper
published in the conference GCC04.
Publications:
 Lin Chen, Tianchi Ma, Cho-Li Wang, Francis C.M. Lau, and Shanping Li, ``GJavaMPI: A Grid Middleware for Transparent MPI Task Migration,'' to appear
in the book "High Performance Computing: Paradigm and Infrastructure",
John Wiley and Sons, Spring 2005.
 Roy S.C. Ho, K.K. Yin, David C.M. Lee, Daniel H.F. Hung, C.L. Wang, and
Francis C.M. Lau, ``InstantGrid: A Framework for On-Demand Grid Point
Construction,'' The International Workshop on Grid and Cooperative
Computing (GCC 2004), pp. 911-914, Oct 21-24, 2004, Wuhan, China.
 Tianchi Ma, Lin Chen, Cho-Li Wang, and Francis C.M. Lau, ``G-PASS:
Security Infrastructure for Grid Travelers, The International Workshop on Grid
and Cooperative Computing (GCC 2004), pp. 301-308, Oct 21-24, 2004,
Wuhan, China.
 Lin Chen, Cho-Li Wang, Francis C.M. Lau, and Ricky K. K. Ma, ``A Grid
Middleware for Distributed Java Computing with MPI Binding and Process
Migration Supports,'' International Workshop on Grid and Cooperative
Computing (GCC-2002), December 26-28, 2002, Hainan, China, , pp. 640-652.
An extended version of this paper has appeared in Journal of Computer Science
and Technology, Vol. 18, No. 4, July 2003, pp. 505-514
IV. Aspects to Be Improved
 The grid services and the portal are not steady enough.
 Some research projects are in experimental level.
V. Future Work
 Improve the portal and grid services
 Research on efficient dynamic scheduling algorithms based on process migration
for various grid applications.
 Promote the resource sharing and information exchange between CNGrid and
HKGrid