Supercomputing 2003, UK e-Science Booth

1
Welcome to the Real World Industry and the
Grid Paul Graham Edinburgh Parallel Computing
Centre United Kingdom p.graham_at_epcc.ed.ac.uk
2
Intro What we do

• Based at the University of Edinburgh
• 65 () staff
• Host Europes largest academic supercomputer
  (1280 CPU IBM HPCx system)
• Cover a broad range of activities
• Facilities, HPC Research, Training, Visitor
  programme, European coordination, and
• Technology Transfer
• Project-based consultancy to industry and
  commerce
• Over 30 clients over the last three years, local
  to multinational
• Funded by businesses, Scottish Enterprise, EC
  and DTI

3
FirstDIG

• Data Investigation on the Grid
• First plc
• UKs largest transport operator over 10,000
  vehicles in the UK
• Specific business questions
• How is our revenue affected by punctuality,
  routes etc?
• Do service disruptions affect customer
  satisfaction, and to what degree?

4
Data Mining

• to assist in answering these questions
• The efficient discovery of valuable, non-obvious
  information from a large collection of data
• EPCCs past experience
• TSB, CG
• but huge range of fragmented data sources

5
Data Sources in the Bus Industry

• Many different kinds of data involved with
  running a bus company
• Mileage, revenue, customer contact, schedule,
  fuel consumption, vehicle maintenance, routes
• Many means to collect data
• Manually entered data at depot
• Data collected on buses from ticket machines
• Data collected on buses from GPS systems
• The problem - data is typically stored in
  disparate databases introduces challenges for
  Data Analysis
• Require ability to analyse their contents in a
  uniform manner and include cross-database analysis

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The solution

• OGSA-DAI
• Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and
  Integration
• DAIS-WG at GGF
• Grid middleware
• Assists with the access and integration of data
  from separate data sources via the Grid
• Represents databases as Grid Services
• Enables access from other machines in a secure
  manner
• Built on GT3, extending to WS-RF, WS-I and other
  interfaces in OGSA-DAIT
• OGSA-DAI Partners
• Funded under UK e-Science Core program
• Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and
  Newcastle
• IBM and Oracle
• http//www.ogsadai.org.uk

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Why OGSA-DAI?

• Need a way to access these disparate databases
• Grid-enable them
• Why the Grid solution?
• Can be accessed from anywhere within the company
  (assuming appropriate permissions)
• Independent of the underlying database management
  systems
• Independent of the underlying operating systems
• User has more time to think about how to utilise
  the data rather than accessing it
• Previously impractical analysis becomes practical

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Issues and Solutions

• OGSA-DAI did not support MS Access, dBASEIV
• Initially aimed at XML databases and MySQL etc
• However, does support JDBC-accessible databases
• Solution Use the Microsoft provided ODBC driver
  and the Sun provided JDBC-ODBC bridge
• Field data
• The BIT data type (Yes/No fields), the Date
  format
• Out of range character codes - limitation of
  XML
• Solution OGSA-DAI team
• Usability
• Use of XML etc can be confusing
• Developed a GUI front end to allow the submission
  of queries and display of results
• Installation
• Documentation

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FirstDIG conclusion

• Successfully demonstrated the use of Grid
  middleware in a real-world environment
• OGSA-DAI valuable feedback and have taken on
  GUI project would have suffered without close
  relationship with the OGSA-DAI team
• First have discovered valuable information from
  their data which otherwise would have been
  virtually unattainable
• This will revolutionise the bus industry -
  Darren Unwin

10
INWA

• Innovation Node Western Australia
• Data mining involving commercial and public
  domain data
• 10 partners from both academia and commerce
  (finance and telecoms)
• Investigation of mortgage and property trends

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Grid technology

• Transfer-queue Over Globus (TOG v1.1) from the UK
  e-Science Sun Data and Compute Grids project
• Provides access to remote HPC resources
• OGSA-DAI (release 3.1)
• To provide access control and discovery of
  distributed heterogeneous data resources
• FirstDIG GUI data browser
• Provides SQL access to the OGSA-DAI enabled data
  sources
• Globus Toolkit 23
• GridFTP, middleware

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The INWA Grid
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Issues

• Getting the data
• Traditionally a file export - OGSA-DAI is
  available - but organizations will not
  contemplate external access to operational/sensiti
  ve data
• So back to a file export
• UK Land registry
• Public data source but no OGSA-DAI interface
• Analysing data
• Little real support for data integration over the
  Grid
• OGSA-DQP (Distributed Query Processing) is
  limited
• Needs Linux, uses OQL which similar to SQL but
  not as common
• Used FirstDIG browser
• Relevant data pulled over - joined locally
• This works but obviously is not ideal
• A lot of user interaction is required - 7 queries
  are necessary to join two datasets

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Issues (cont)

• Grid Computation Large data sets so,
• Cleaning and mining jobs sent to where data is
  resident (UK and Australia)
• Globus Toolkit V2.x (GT2), Grid Engine and TOG
  used
• But
• Installation issues with GT2
• Not out-of-the-box, requires significant time,
  effort, expertise
• Security issues with GT2 TOG
• Bug in the Globus Java CoG Kit
• Security flag omission in TOG
• Although it all now works and is currently being
  used between UK and Australia

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INWA Summary

• Trust - Organizations understandably wary about
  installation of software and the access it
  provides
• Security, Security, Security
• Not mature enough
• Software
• Not robust enough
• Bugs found in all major software used Globus,
  OGSA-DAI and TOG
• Sys admin skills still necessary to maintain the
  grid
• INWA conclusion
• In this case, middleware probably not mature
  enough for commercial deployment
• Follow-on work with China

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PGPGrid

• Peppers Ghost Productions Ltd (PGP) is a UK
  company that produces Computer-Generated
  Animations (CGA)
• 3D-Matic Lab at Glasgow University offers
  optical, 3D-data transfer technology to SMEs
• 24-camera capture rig allows the viewpoint to be
  where you want it, even if there was no camera
  there in the first-place
• Actors play the part, their expressions are
  abstracted and applied to animated models
• 3D-Matic code CPU, memory and data-intensive -
  inherently parallel
• Rendering, a late stage in animation, is
  compute-intensive - inherently parallel, but
  animator control is necessary

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Modelling
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Using the Grid

• Ranging and modelling code
• System of nodes can solve a problem or pass it
  on, and also pass communications channel on
• Lookup for available nodes is done through a
  Resource Locator Service based on web services
• Remote Rendering
• Animators can use as many CPUs as they can find
  for rendering when they have a contract, but they
  have frequent periods of idling.
• There are businesses that provide farms for CGA.
• Animators have little control as they lose
  interactivity
• Thats costly, as flawed rendered batches need to
  be discarded.
• The Remote Rendering Service (RRS) is a web
  service which will allow the submission and
  monitoring of rendering jobs to a remote farm

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Issues and Solutions

• GridFTP is earmarked for the transfer of files
• A challenge on its own, we aim to use JavaCoG to
  avoid Globus Toolkit x
• There is no GridFTP-server implementation for
  Windows - PGP use PCs
• When rendering is complete, the rendering server
  cannot push the files back
• GridFTP asymmetric, only the GridFTP client
  initiates transfers
• Client pings server periodically and pulls the
  files instead
• No monitoring capabilities for remote rendering
• We will implement our own - WS
• Work in progress

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Conclusions

• Weve seen three real-world Grid projects
• There are many challenges to getting industry
  involved with Grid projects, and in making them
  successful
• Robustness
• Ease of use
• Security
• Support
• but it is possible and potentially very
  rewarding to all involved.

21
Thankyou

• Paul Graham, p.graham_at_epcc.ed.ac.uk
• FirstDIG, http//www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/firstdig
• INWA, http//www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/inwa
• PGPGrid, http//www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/pgpgrid