[ieeetcsc-discuss] The Gridbus Project Releases Grid Service Broker (v.3.1) Software

[Rajkumar Buyya]

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The Gridbus Project Releases Grid Service Broker (v.3.1) Software
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The Gridbus Project at the University of Melbourne, Australia is pleased
to release a new version of the Grid Service Broker. The broker provides
capabilities such as resource selection, job scheduling, job management
and data access to any application that requires distributed Grid
resources for execution. The broker handles communication with the
resources running different Grid middleware, job failures, varying
resource availability, and different user objectives such as meeting a
deadline for execution or limiting execution within a certain budget.

With the current release, version 3.1, a new organisational structure is
provided for the broker, wherein the core is separated from additional
capabilities provided as plugins that can be selected according to usage
requirements. A new Ant build file has been provided to enable selection
of plugins and the automatic configuration of the broker thereof. Also
available is a new external plugin that uses the capabilties of the
Gridbus broker to schedule Grid workflows.

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What's New:
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-Plugin structure for middleware and programming models
-Ant build file for automatic downloading and configuration of broker
installation.
-Workflow engine plugin
-Thread programming model plugin (similar to Alchemi Grid Threads)

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Gridbus in e-Science Enablements
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The Gridbus Broker has been used in Grid enabling several e-Science and
e-Business applications. The most recent usages include:

* European Union funded Data Mining Grid Project, which developed set of
Grid-based datamining tools and used Gridbus Broker in managing
execution of data mining computations on global Grids:
http://www.datamininggrid.org/

* KidneyGrid partners including Melbourne Medical School and Université
d'Evry, France created a Grid portal that integrated distributed kidney
models.

* Molecular Modelling: As part of the Australian National Grid
(APACGrid), a portal for docking of molecules from CDB with protein
target with the aim of discovery potential drug candidates:
     http://grid.apac.edu.au/OurUsers/MolecularDocking

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Base Technologies:
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The Gridbus Broker v3.1 supports/uses the following middleware:
Globus 2.4.x, Globus 4.0.2, Alchemi 1.0.6, Condor 6.8.4, OpenPBS 2.3,
SGE, NWS 2.8, SRB(Storage Resource Broker) 3.x

The Gridbus Broker v3.1 supports/uses the following programming model:
   - Task/Job model
   - Gridbus Workflow
   - Grid Threading Programming Model

The Gridbus Broker v3.1 can utilise a resource via SSH for submitting and
executing grid jobs on: OpenPBS 2.3, Condor 6.8.4, SGE, Fork (on
Unix-like OSes)

Download information:
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The broker source code,binaries, documentation and manual can be
downloaded from http://www.gridbus.org/broker/

Contact Information:
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For further details about the Gridbus broker and/or the Gridbus project
please contact:
   - Dr. Rajkumar Buyya (raj at ...) - append @csse.unimelb.edu.au
   - Srikumar Venugopal (srikumar at ...)
   - Xingchen Chu (xchu at ...)

Licenses and Disclaimer:
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The Gridbus broker and the GUI is distributed under the GNU General
Public License (GPL) (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt). Other
libraries included in the distribution are distributed under their own
respective licenses which are also included.

This product includes software developed by and/or derived from the
Globus project (http://www.globus.org/). This product includes dom4j
libraries (http://www.dom4j.org).  Other licenses can be found in the
licenses directory of the Gridbus Broker v3.1 distribution.

Acknowledgments:
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The Gridbus Broker is developed by the Gridbus Project, Grid Computing
and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Lab., Dept. of Computer Science and
Software Engineering, the University of Melbourne, Australia. The
project is currently supported by the Australian Research Council and
DEST (Department of Education, Science and Training) grants, and the
University of Melbourne. We are grateful to, and sincerely thank all the
people who contributed to the Gridbus Broker project. For further
information on the Gridbus Project, please visit  - http://www.gridbus.org/
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