Web: www.omii.ac.uk Email: info@omii.ac.uk

OMII-UK LiveCD Demonstrations – Providing

Access to Computational Resources for Researchers

AHM 2009Steve Crouch, Justin Bradley,

Yew Bie Cheng, Richard Boardman

Web: www.omii.ac.uk Email: info@omii.ac.uk

http://www.omii.ac.uk/wiki/AHM2009

Background

• Evaluating Grid software is difficult!o Just want ‘to have a go’ – determine suitabilityo Non-trivial: installation, configuration, security

• Evaluation should be easyo But not sacrifice demonstration of featureso Provide pre-installed demonstrations of software

using real scientific applicationso Straightforward, minimum number of steps to use

• Time-to-evaluation should be minimalo Obtaining demonstration packageo Initialising the package

Web: www.omii.ac.uk Email: info@omii.ac.uk

http://www.omii.ac.uk/wiki/AHM2009

What is the LiveCD?

• Based around Slax LiveCD distribution• Designed to run completely from

system RAMo Doesn’t access machine harddisk(s)

• Users can either:o Simply boot normal desktop/laptop from the

CDo From within a virtual machine, boot from .iso

image file

• 2GB RAM recommended!

Web: www.omii.ac.uk Email: info@omii.ac.uk

http://www.omii.ac.uk/wiki/AHM2009

What’s on the LiveCD?

• Campus Grid Toolkit (CGT)o Includes GridSAM and AHEo Easy to install and use package providing

access to computational and data resources• e.g. PBS, Condor, Sun GridEngine, Globus, LSF

o Demonstrations using computational resources:

• Fractal – calculate a Mandelbrot set, • Primes – calculate prime numbers

o Utilise PBS/Torque cluster (pre-installed) or local ‘fork’

Web: www.omii.ac.uk Email: info@omii.ac.uk

http://www.omii.ac.uk/wiki/AHM2009

What’s on the LiveCD?

• RAPIDo Design and deliver web portal interfaces to

research applications requiring computational resources

• e.g. PBS, Condor, Sun GridEngine

o RAPID-created portal demonstrations:• RapidDemo – BLAST application – used by

bioinformaticians to take a protein sequence, model it, and attempt to find match in protein database

• MinemDemo – Minem application – physics application to model charge distribution in a plasma