EGI Introductory Package: an easy start for new user communities

Introduction

EGI Introductory Package is a simple but complete solution for running and monitoring of computing tasks on the grid. The Package is designed for small and medium user communities which want to start using the grid technologies without much of initial overhead. It is then easy for a community to customize or scale-up the system as their needs grow.

The Package consists of:

• the Ganga user interface for easy job submission and management,
• the DIANE task scheduler for increasing the quality of service of the baseline grid infrastructure and advanced task workflows,
• the mini-Dashboard monitoring service which provides a web-based interface where users may easily keep track of Ganga and DIANE jobs
  • http://gangamon.cern.ch/ganga
  • http://dianemon.cern.ch/diane

Ganga and DIANE are command-line tools. The mini-Dashboard is a service which is implemented with apache/django/mysql as a data backend, ajax web2.0 hBrowseFramework as a web interface and ActiveMQ/MSG technology as a transport layer for monitoring messages.

Steps for a new community

Try it out-of-the-box

We invite a small user community to try out the Package out-of-the-box: simply install Ganga and DIANE and enable the mini-Dashboard monitoring (see instructions). Note, that we provide the mini-Dashboard service instance at CERN for test purposes and small communities only.

Customize monitoring interface

It is possible to easily customize the monitoring web interface views, for example adding new plots or columns in the overview table, or to add application-specific information to the views. This may be easily achieved by simply copying the hBrowseFramework source files to your web server and modifying the setting file. In this case, the CERN mini-Dashboard service instance collects the monitoring data and serves as a data source for hBrowseFramework interface.

Deployment of a separate mini-Dashboard instance

CERN mini-Dashboard instance is provided for test purposes and small communities only. If your user community generates a huge number of jobs, you'll be required to setup your own mini-Dashboard instance for production use. The mini-Dashboard service is based on standard software packages, such as apache/django, and it may be easily configured to use mysql, or other databases supported by django. The documentation how to deploy your own instance is currently under development. For the moment you may get a feeling of it by looking into internal documentation.

Communities using the EGI Introductory Package

• EnviroGrids
• Geant4
• VLMED

-- JakubMoscicki - 13-Jan-2011