The Grid as a Software Application Provider in a Synchrotron Radiation Facility

Abstract

In this chapter we introduce the concept of the Grid as an Application Service Provider. We discuss the implementation and deployment of a fully operational system in a Synchrotron Radiation Facility. The Grid is traditionally used for HTC computations and not often as a provider for Software on Demand; especially for non-Grid specific GUI based applications. As a computing paradigm, the Grid is successfully utilised by the experimental scientific community. Due to the data-parallelism of the computational problems in the general field of physical sciences and the very high data volumes in terms of storage, the Grid has been closely related to High Throughput and High Performance Computing (HTC/HPC). A substantial number of software applications in the form of scientific computing utilities that do not require HPC are used in Synchrotron labs and other similar establishments. We envisioned a common web portal where the lab user can access a defined set of pre-configured scientific computing applications 1 that rely on Grid resources. The pilot application has been in the SRF Elettra. 2 The model and the intermediate subsystems have been developed and suitably configured. In this chapter we propose (1) a "Software as a Service" model (SaaS) as an alternative deployment for these applications, (2) we introduce an infrastructure where our SaaS model is fully integrated to the Grid -utilising remote computation and storage resources, (3) we outline our technology layout that enables interactivity, transparent access to storage, Web Grid portals, virtual collaboration environments and remote access to SRF instrumentation. M. Prica (B)