Interactive European Grid

Projektinformationen

INT.EU.GRID

ID Finanzhilfevereinbarung: 31857

Projekt abgeschlossen

Startdatum 1 Mai 2006

Enddatum 30 April 2008

Finanziert unter

• Research infrastructures: Specific programme for research, technological development and demonstration: "Structuring the European Research Area" under the Sixth Framework Programme 2002-2006

Gesamtkosten € 2 637 000,00

EU-Beitrag € 1 986 000,00

Koordiniert durch

CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS
Spain

Exploitable results

Benefits of using an interactive grid

Computing resources available to research teams today range from laptops to supercomputers. So the first question is what is the advantage of using an Interactive Grid? Compared to a laptop or a personal workstation the answer is clear: access to more powerful resources, which allow reducing the time to get the desired result, or even make it possible. Let’s consider the example of researchers at FZK centre in Germany working on the development of a prototype for Ultra Sound Computing Tomography (USCT). This is a new method for breast cancer detection, targeted at hospitals for breast cancer screening. The main advantages of the method are a fixed 3D setup that ensures reproducible 3D imaging capabilities and the possibility of capturing images in different modalities (speed of sound, reflection or absorption). As for resources usage, one single measurement contains about 20 GB of data. The reconstruction of a 3D volume image depends on the desired resolution. It takes around 10 days on a single workstation to compute it using 100 slices, each one with one megapixel resolution. The software for image reconstruction is developed using Matlab, while the most inner part of the codes has been written in assembler in order to speed up the reconstruction. Initially researchers at FZK have used the Interactive Grid infrastructure to speed up the development and testing of algorithms in their daily work. However the final objective is to speed up the production process: 10 days reconstruction time is too long for regular use at any hospital, and the goal is to employ approximately 30 minutes for the reconstruction by using the Grid. What is the advantage of using the Interactive European Grid in this case? The possibility to access visualization services, thanks to the i2glogin tool, providing a bi-directional channel between the Grid infrastructure where the application is executing and the user desktop, allowing interactive steering, and supporting video streaming. This tool developed in the i2g project has been now integrated in the external packages supported by the EGEE project (through the RESPECT program). The researchers can execute the program in the Grid whenever they need, as long as there are available resources for their Virtual Organization. In particular they can run it with ''interactive'' priority even if all those available resources are busy executing long batch jobs: their priority will be reduced and the interactive job will execute immediately. This is possible thanks to the use of the CrossBroker job scheduler, only available in the Interactive European Grid. The advantage for the researchers of having access to the Interactive European Grid is manifold: - they can share data and simulations through the network profiting of the enhanced distributed storage - they can develop in interactive way but using exactly the same production framework - they can access significant resources (hundredths of cpus) for peak periods, within a short notice time. The last two advantages are much appreciated by the researchers. Providing 20.000 cpu hours within the week previous to a workshop or conference to finish on-time an analysis is not so obvious: compared to a similar time-request for time in a supercomputer node, 50.000 cpu hours were assigned but distributed over a period of four months and requested at least one month in advance. In this case the Interactive European Grid provides the flexibility needed in front-line research.