Grid Meter » Grid-enabling an application -- what does it involve?

November 16, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Grid-enabling an application -- what does it involve?

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A theme that we've touched on before, after the GridWorld conference last month, is the need to make Grid "all about the applications". Indeed, for enterprise Grid adoption, the ability to easily 'Grid-enable' applications has been cited as a major initial obstacle to widespread commercial Grid adoption.

At the University of Buffalo, Grid researchers have been making progress on grid-enabling research and science applications, with a project called GAT ("Grid-Enabling Application Template"). According to Mark Green, Computational Scientist at SUNY Buffalo's Center for Computational Research:

"A GAT essentially takes research code or even a commercial code and builds a small, very simple GUI on top of it. That GUI is presented within a grid portal. So as soon as you port your application to the grid portal, you can immediately use all the backend grids that the GAT portal has incorporated. That includes Grid 3, Open Science Grid, Open Science Grid ITB, TeraGrid, ACDC Grid, Western New York grid, and ultimately New York State Grid. So you port it once and you can use all the resources that the portal uses."

Green says that there are currently two earthquake engineering applications, some numerical methods applications, two quantum chemistry application suites, and several different bioinformatics & structural biology applications that have been grid-enabled with GAT.

This is a classic example where enterprise could again take a page from the books of research and academia. Similar portals and templates focused on enterprise applications would be quite the catalyst for making Grid commonplace.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 16, 2005 09:13 AM

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