Final Report DFN-Project “GRIDWELTEN: User Requirements and Environments for GRID-Computing”

The GRIDWELTEN project aims to evaluate and make recommendations regarding the use of high performance computing resources accessible through Grid software and architectures. The metric for this comparison will be the expectations and requirements of the user situated at the sites of the project partners and at other HPC-centers throughout Germany. Typical user groups will come from many areas of science, and we must be careful to incorporate the expectations of each into a set of common requirements. With this in mind, a survey of the end users was conducted. The findings of other relevant research in the area of Grid usability will also be discussed. Select Grid middleware and supporting software will be reviewed. In particular, we match and consolidate between the end user expectations and the features of some popular Grid infrastructures. For this, we consider the four Grid systems, Globus, UNICORE, AVAKI and TME(ITBL). In the report we also examine the implications of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) proposed by the Global Grid Forum, on the operation and future interoperability of the evaluated systems. The final project documentation will be presented in three main sections: firstly, a summary of user requirements for Grid computing, secondly, an evaluation of selected Grid computing environments, and thirdly a detailed analysis. The GRIDWELTEN project is commissioned by the German DFN (Deutsches Forschungsnetz).