COMP Superscalar

Overview: 

COMP Superscalar is a new version of  GRID superscalar  which also aims to ease the development of Grid applications. Like GRID superscalar, COMP superscalar exploits the inherent parallelism of applications when running them on the Grid. However, with respect to its predecessor, COMP Superscalar has three main distinctive features:
 

  • The runtime of COMP Superscalar is formed by a set of components, each one in charge of a given functionality. This componentised runtime follows the Grid Component Model (GCM), a component model especially designed for the Grid whose reference implementation is provided by ProActive.
  • COMP Superscalar offers a straightforward programming model that particularly targets Java applications. The simplicity of this programming model keeps the Grid transparent to the user, who is able to program their applications in a Grid-unaware fashion. The user is only required to select the tasks to be run on the Grid, while the application can remain completely free of Grid-related calls.
  • COMP Superscalar can use a wide range of Grid middlewares thanks to the JavaGAT API. JavaGAT provides COMP Superscalar with a uniform interface for job submission and file transfer operations, being able to choose between different middlewares like Globus, UNICORE or SSH.
Objectives: 

Over the last years, Grid computing has become a very important research area. Grids allow the parallel execution of applications in a heterogeneous infrastructure of geographically distributed resources. However, writing an application that uses the resources of a computational Grid is not as easy as writing a sequential application, and requires the programmer to deal with a number of Grid-related concerns, like resource management or job scheduling and submission.

In this sense, COMP Superscalar meets the need for programming models that simplify the development of Grid applications: the main objective of COMP Superscalar is to keep the Grid as transparent as possible to the programmer.

With COMP Superscalar, a sequential Java application that invokes methods of a certain granularity (tasks) is automatically converted into a parallel application whose tasks are executed in different resources of a computational Grid.

Additional Information: 

 

  • Work in progress
Forthcoming work on COMP Superscalar includes:
    • Providing COMP Superscalar with Service-Level Agreements: COMP superscalar will store information about the execution of the application tasks and then compare it to a contract to see if it is fulfilled.
    • Extending the programming model to allow the user to specify arrays and objects as parameters of tasks, and also analysing the dependencies for such kinds of data.
    • Moving COMP Superscalar to a Service-Oriented Architecture, making it able to process the tasks of several applications at the same time.

  • Contact
enric.tejedor.at.bsc.es

  • European Projects

    • CoreGRID

PUBLICATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS

Publications

Book chapters

E. Tejedor, R. Badia, T. Kielmann and V. Getov. A Component-Based Integrated Toolkit. Making Grids Work, CoreGRID series, Vol 7, pp 139-152. M. Danelutto, P. Fragopoulou and V. Getov, Eds. Springer., January 2008.

International Conferences

Enric Tejedor, Rosa M. Badia, Romina Royo and Josep L. Gelpí. Enabling HMMER for the Grid with COMP Superscalar. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science 2010, , May 2010.

Enric Tejedor and Rosa M. Badia.. COMP Superscalar: Bringing GRID superscalar and GCM Together. 8th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid 2008, Lyon, , May 2008.

Workshops

M. Ejdys, U. Herman-Izycka, N. Lal, T. Kielmann, E. Tejedor and R. Badia,. Integrating Application and System Components with GCM. CoreGRID Symposium 2008, , August 2008.

Enric Tejedor, Rosa M. Badia, Paul Naoumenko, Marcela Rivera and Cédric Dalmasso. Orchestrating a safe functional suspension of GCM components. CoreGRID Integration Workshop. Integrated Research in Grid Computing, , April 2008.

Enric Tejedor, Rosa M. Badia , Thilo Kielmann, Vladimir Getov. A Component-Based Integrated Toolkit. CoreGRID Workshop on Grid Programming Model, Grid and P2P Systems Architecture, Grid Systems, Tools and Environments, Heraklion, Crete (Greece), , June 2007.

Communications

Daniele Lezzi, Rosa M. Badia. OGF-Europe on Software development tools for distributed computing . OGF25, , March 2009.
Catania (Sicilia, Italia)