CCP1 - AHE Evaluation

Installation and testing of the Application Hosting Environment

The Application Hosting Environment (AHE) is a lightweight hosting environment that provides scientists with application specific services to utilise grid resources in a quick, transparent manner with the scientific objective as the main driver of the activity. The AHE provides resource selection, application launching, workflow execution, provenance and data-recovery.

The AHE utilises a client-server architechture, with a lightweight Java Gui (and associated scripts) that can be installed on user's machine and a more heavy-weight server that mediates the clients interaction with applications on the grid, by presentiing them as web services.

Project Investigator

Jens Thomas, CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory

Scientific/ Technical Objectives

The objective of this work is to install the AHE on a server within Daresbury and use this to submit jobs to various nodes of the NW-Grid. Once this basis work has been done, work will be undertaken to enable GAMESS-UK to be hosted as an application within the AHE, and for GAMESS-UK users on the NW-Grid to use the AHE to submit and monitor their jobs.

Role of NW-GRID

The nodes of NW-Grid are the target grid resource that the AHE will be running jobs on.

Applications Software

The applications software used for the project is the GAMESS-UK Ab Initio Quantum Chemistry code.

Grid Software

The AHE server software installs as part of the OMMI infrastructure. The OMII release provides two sets of standards: web services and grid services. The web services provide service-level Server-Agent connectivity, utilising SOAP for communication and WSDL for web service specification and publication and XML Security. These web services are provided by Apache Axis and hosted by Jakarta's Apache Tomcat webserver.

Progress to date

The AHE has been installed on a dedicated server and all of the components appear to be working correctly. There are currently problems with the way that the client authenticates itself to the server that have prevented the AHE being used to drive applications on the NW-Grid. We are currently working together with the developers of the AHE to debug these problems and envisage having a working installation soon.