SAGA: A Simple API for Grid Applications. High-level application programming on the Grid
Goodale Tom 1,2, Jha Shantenu 3, Kaiser Hartmut 2, Kielmann Thilo 4, Kleijer Pascal 5, Von Laszewski Gregor 6, Lee Craig A. 7, Merzky Andre 4, Rajic Hrabri L. 8, Shalf John 9
1Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
2Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA
3University College, London, UK
4Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
5NEC, HPC Marketing Promotion Division, Japan
6Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, USA
7The Aerospace Corporation, USA
8Intel Americas Inc., USA
9Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA
DOI: 10.12921/cmst.2006.12.01.07-20
OAI: oai:lib.psnc.pl:610
Abstract:
Grid technology has matured considerably over the past few years. Progress in both implementation and standardization is reaching a level of robustness that enables production quality deployments of grid services in the academic research community with heightened interest and early adoption in the industrial community. Despite this progress, grid applications are far from ubiquitous, and new applications require an enormous amount of programming effort just to see first light. A key impediment to accelerated deployment of grid applications is the scarcity of high-level application programming abstractions that bridge the gap between existing grid middleware and application-level needs. The Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA [1]) is a GGF standardization effort that addresses this particular gap by providing a simple, stable, and uniform programming interface that integrates the most common grid programming abstractions. These most common abstractions were identified through the analysis of several existing and emerging Grid applications. In this article, we present the SAGA effort, describe its relationship to other Grid API efforts within the GGF community, and introduce the first draft of the API using some application programming examples.
Key words:
References:
[1] GGF. (2004) Simple API for Grid Applications Research Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/saga-rg/
[2] G. Allen, K. Davis, K. N. Dolkas, N. D. Doulamis, T. Goodale, T. Kielmann, A. Merzky, J. Nabrzyski, J. Pukacki, T. Radke, M. Russell, E. Seidel, J. Shalf and I. Taylor, Enabling Applications on the Grid – A GridLab Overview, International Journal on High Performance Computing Applications 17(4), 449-466 (2003).
[3] G. Allen, K. Davis, T. Goodale, A. Hutanu, H. Kaiser, T. Kielmann, A. Merzky, R. van Nieuwpoort, A. Reinefeld, F. Schintke, T. Schütt, E. Seidel and B. Ullmer, The Grid Application Toolkit: Towards Generic and Easy Application Programming Interfaces for the Grid, Proceedings of the IEEE, 93(8), 534-550 (2005).
[4] G. von Laszewski, I. Foster, J. Gawor, and P. Lane, A Java Commodity Grid Kit, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 13, 643-662 (2001). [Online]. Available: http:/www.cogkit.org/
[5] RealityGrid Project. (2005) The RealityGrid Project. [Online]. Available: http://www.realitygrid.org/
[6] Particle Physics Data Grid. [Online]. Available: http://www.ppdg.net
[7] Illinois BioGrid. [Online]. Available: http://gridweb.cti.depaul.edu/twiki/bin/vie /IBG/AboutIBG
[8] GGF. (2004) Data Replication Research Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/jsdl-wg/
[9] D. Darlin, A Journey to a Thousand Maps Begin With an Open Code, New York Times, Oct. 20th, 2005. [Online]. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/technology/ circuits/20maps.html? emc=eta1
[10] I. Foster et al., The Open Grid Services Architecture, Version 1.0, January 2005,
http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.30.pdf.
[11] GGF. (2003) Distributed Resource Management API Working Group. [Online]. Available:
http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/drmaa-wg/
[12] H. Rajic, R. Brobst, W. Chan, F. Ferstl, J. Gardiner, A. Haas, B. Nitzberg, H. Rajic and J. Tollefsrud, Distributed Resource Management Application API Specification 1.0, Global Grid Forum, Tech. Rep., June 2004, GFD.022. [Online]. Available: http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.22.pdf
[13] K. Seymour, H. Nakada, S. Matsuoka, J. Dongarra, C. Lee, and H. Casanova, An Overview of GridRPC: A Remote Procedure Call API for Grid Computing, in 3rd International Workshop on Grid Computing, vol. 2536.1em plus 0.5em minus 0.4emSpringer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 274-278, November 2002.
[14] D. Arnold, S. Agrawal, S. Blackford, J. Dongarra, C. Fabianek, T. Hiroyasu, E. Meek, M. Miller, K. Sagi, K. Seymour, Z. Shi and S. Vadhiyar, Users’ Guide to NetSolve V2.0, The NetSolve Project, Innovative Computing Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Tech. Rep., 2004. [Online]. Available: http://icl.cs.utk.edu/netsolve/
[15] Y. Tanaka, H. Nakada, S. Sekiguchi, T. Suzumura and S. Matsuoka, Ninf-G: A reference implementation of RPCbased programming middleware for Grid computing, Journal of Grid Computing 1(1), 41-51, (2003). [Online]. Available: http://ipsapp009.kluweronline.com/content/getfile/6160/1/3/abstract.htm; http://ipsapp009.kluweronline.com/content/getfile/6160/1/3 /fulltext.pdf
[16] E. Caron and F. Desprez, DIET: A Scalable Toolbox to Build Network Enabled Servers on the Grid, International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications 2005, to appear.
[17] K. Seymour, H. Nakada, S. Matsuoka, J. Dongarra, C. Lee and H. Casanova, A GridRPC Model and API for End-User Applications, September 2005, http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.52.pdf.
[18] GGF. (2003) Grid Checkpoint Recovery Working Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/gridcpr-wg/
[19] GGF. (2004) Grid File Systems Working Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/gfs-wg/
[20] Resource Namespace Service – Proposed Final Draft v1.3. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/gfswg/document/Resourcesdo5(N)amespacesdo5(S)ervicesdo5(P)roposedsdo5(F)inalsdo5(D)raftsdo5(v)1.3/en/2
[21] GGF. (2004) ByteIO Working Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/byteio-wg/
[22] GGF. (2001) GridFTP Working Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/gridftp-wg/
[23] GGF. (2004) Job Submission and Description Language Working Group. [Online]. Available:
http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/jsdl-wg/
[24] GGF. (2003) Persistent Archives Research Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/pa-rg/
[25] GGF. (2004) OGSA Replication Services Working Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/jsdl-wg/
[26] R. Moore and A. Merzky, Persistent Archive Concepts, Global Grid Forum, Tech. Rep., December 2003, GFD.026. [Online]. Available: http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.26.pdf
[27] GridLab Project. (2002), The Replica Management Service. [Online]. Available: http://www.gridlab.org/data
[28] I. Foster, C. Kesselman and S. Tuecke, The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations, International Journal of Supercomputer Applications 15(3), 2001.
[29] K. Davis, T. Goodale and A. Merzky, GAT API Specification: Object Based, EU Project GridLab, Deliverable D1.5, June 2003. [Online]. Available: http://www.gridlab.org/ WorkPackages/wp-1/Documents/Gridlab-1-GAS-0004.ObjectBasedAPISpecification.pdf
[30] G. von Laszewski, I. Foster, J. Gawor, and P. Lane, A Java Commodity Grid Kit, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 13(8-9), 643-662 (2001), http://www.cogkits.org.
[31] D. C. D. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Computational Research Division. (2005) Python Globus (pyGlobus). [Online]. Available: http://dsd.lbl.gov/gtg/projects/pyGlobus/
[32] S. Jha, P. V. Coveney, M. Harvey and R. Pinning, SPICE: Simulated Pore Interactive Computing Environment, Proceedings of ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference 2005, http://sc05.supercomputing.org/schedule/pdf/anal109.pdf http://sc05.supercomputing.org/schedule/pdf/anal109.pdf.
[33] The TeraGyroid Experiment, Accepted for GGF10 Applications Workshop. [Online]. Available: http://www.realitygrid.org/ TeraGyroid-Case-Study-GGF10.pdf, http://www.realitygrid.org/TeraGyroid-Case-Study-GGF10.pdf
[34] R. Berlich, M. Kunze and K. Schwarz, Grid computing in Europe: from research to deployment, in CRPIT ’44: Proceedings of the 2005 Australasian workshop on Grid computing
and e-research.1em plus 0.5em minus 0.4emDarlinghurst, Australia: Australian Computer Society, Inc., pp. 21-27, 2005.
[35] S. D. Team, (2005) Simple API for Grid Applications – Strawman API Version 0.2. [Online]. Available: http://wiki.cct.lsu.edu/saga/space/start/strawman-api-v0.2.pdf
[36] S. Pickles, R. Pinning, A. Porter, G. Riley, R. pert Ford, K. Mayes, D. Snelling, J. Stanton, S. Kenny and S. Jha, The realitygrid computational steering api version 1.1, Reality
Grid, Tech. Rep., 2004, http://www.sve.man.ac.uk/Research/AtoZ/RealityGrid/Steering/ReGsdo5(s)teer ingsdo5(a)pi.pdfe-print.
[37] P. Kacsuk, G. Dózsa, J. Kovács, R. Lovas, N. Podhorszki, Z. Balaton and G. Gombás, P-GRADE: A Grid Programming Environment, Journal of Grid Computing, 2, 171-197 (2003).
Grid technology has matured considerably over the past few years. Progress in both implementation and standardization is reaching a level of robustness that enables production quality deployments of grid services in the academic research community with heightened interest and early adoption in the industrial community. Despite this progress, grid applications are far from ubiquitous, and new applications require an enormous amount of programming effort just to see first light. A key impediment to accelerated deployment of grid applications is the scarcity of high-level application programming abstractions that bridge the gap between existing grid middleware and application-level needs. The Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA [1]) is a GGF standardization effort that addresses this particular gap by providing a simple, stable, and uniform programming interface that integrates the most common grid programming abstractions. These most common abstractions were identified through the analysis of several existing and emerging Grid applications. In this article, we present the SAGA effort, describe its relationship to other Grid API efforts within the GGF community, and introduce the first draft of the API using some application programming examples.
Key words:
References:
[1] GGF. (2004) Simple API for Grid Applications Research Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/saga-rg/
[2] G. Allen, K. Davis, K. N. Dolkas, N. D. Doulamis, T. Goodale, T. Kielmann, A. Merzky, J. Nabrzyski, J. Pukacki, T. Radke, M. Russell, E. Seidel, J. Shalf and I. Taylor, Enabling Applications on the Grid – A GridLab Overview, International Journal on High Performance Computing Applications 17(4), 449-466 (2003).
[3] G. Allen, K. Davis, T. Goodale, A. Hutanu, H. Kaiser, T. Kielmann, A. Merzky, R. van Nieuwpoort, A. Reinefeld, F. Schintke, T. Schütt, E. Seidel and B. Ullmer, The Grid Application Toolkit: Towards Generic and Easy Application Programming Interfaces for the Grid, Proceedings of the IEEE, 93(8), 534-550 (2005).
[4] G. von Laszewski, I. Foster, J. Gawor, and P. Lane, A Java Commodity Grid Kit, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 13, 643-662 (2001). [Online]. Available: http:/www.cogkit.org/
[5] RealityGrid Project. (2005) The RealityGrid Project. [Online]. Available: http://www.realitygrid.org/
[6] Particle Physics Data Grid. [Online]. Available: http://www.ppdg.net
[7] Illinois BioGrid. [Online]. Available: http://gridweb.cti.depaul.edu/twiki/bin/vie /IBG/AboutIBG
[8] GGF. (2004) Data Replication Research Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/jsdl-wg/
[9] D. Darlin, A Journey to a Thousand Maps Begin With an Open Code, New York Times, Oct. 20th, 2005. [Online]. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/technology/ circuits/20maps.html? emc=eta1
[10] I. Foster et al., The Open Grid Services Architecture, Version 1.0, January 2005,
http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.30.pdf.
[11] GGF. (2003) Distributed Resource Management API Working Group. [Online]. Available:
http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/drmaa-wg/
[12] H. Rajic, R. Brobst, W. Chan, F. Ferstl, J. Gardiner, A. Haas, B. Nitzberg, H. Rajic and J. Tollefsrud, Distributed Resource Management Application API Specification 1.0, Global Grid Forum, Tech. Rep., June 2004, GFD.022. [Online]. Available: http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.22.pdf
[13] K. Seymour, H. Nakada, S. Matsuoka, J. Dongarra, C. Lee, and H. Casanova, An Overview of GridRPC: A Remote Procedure Call API for Grid Computing, in 3rd International Workshop on Grid Computing, vol. 2536.1em plus 0.5em minus 0.4emSpringer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 274-278, November 2002.
[14] D. Arnold, S. Agrawal, S. Blackford, J. Dongarra, C. Fabianek, T. Hiroyasu, E. Meek, M. Miller, K. Sagi, K. Seymour, Z. Shi and S. Vadhiyar, Users’ Guide to NetSolve V2.0, The NetSolve Project, Innovative Computing Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Tech. Rep., 2004. [Online]. Available: http://icl.cs.utk.edu/netsolve/
[15] Y. Tanaka, H. Nakada, S. Sekiguchi, T. Suzumura and S. Matsuoka, Ninf-G: A reference implementation of RPCbased programming middleware for Grid computing, Journal of Grid Computing 1(1), 41-51, (2003). [Online]. Available: http://ipsapp009.kluweronline.com/content/getfile/6160/1/3/abstract.htm; http://ipsapp009.kluweronline.com/content/getfile/6160/1/3 /fulltext.pdf
[16] E. Caron and F. Desprez, DIET: A Scalable Toolbox to Build Network Enabled Servers on the Grid, International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications 2005, to appear.
[17] K. Seymour, H. Nakada, S. Matsuoka, J. Dongarra, C. Lee and H. Casanova, A GridRPC Model and API for End-User Applications, September 2005, http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.52.pdf.
[18] GGF. (2003) Grid Checkpoint Recovery Working Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/gridcpr-wg/
[19] GGF. (2004) Grid File Systems Working Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/gfs-wg/
[20] Resource Namespace Service – Proposed Final Draft v1.3. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/gfswg/document/Resourcesdo5(N)amespacesdo5(S)ervicesdo5(P)roposedsdo5(F)inalsdo5(D)raftsdo5(v)1.3/en/2
[21] GGF. (2004) ByteIO Working Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/byteio-wg/
[22] GGF. (2001) GridFTP Working Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/gridftp-wg/
[23] GGF. (2004) Job Submission and Description Language Working Group. [Online]. Available:
http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/jsdl-wg/
[24] GGF. (2003) Persistent Archives Research Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/pa-rg/
[25] GGF. (2004) OGSA Replication Services Working Group. [Online]. Available: http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/jsdl-wg/
[26] R. Moore and A. Merzky, Persistent Archive Concepts, Global Grid Forum, Tech. Rep., December 2003, GFD.026. [Online]. Available: http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.26.pdf
[27] GridLab Project. (2002), The Replica Management Service. [Online]. Available: http://www.gridlab.org/data
[28] I. Foster, C. Kesselman and S. Tuecke, The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations, International Journal of Supercomputer Applications 15(3), 2001.
[29] K. Davis, T. Goodale and A. Merzky, GAT API Specification: Object Based, EU Project GridLab, Deliverable D1.5, June 2003. [Online]. Available: http://www.gridlab.org/ WorkPackages/wp-1/Documents/Gridlab-1-GAS-0004.ObjectBasedAPISpecification.pdf
[30] G. von Laszewski, I. Foster, J. Gawor, and P. Lane, A Java Commodity Grid Kit, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 13(8-9), 643-662 (2001), http://www.cogkits.org.
[31] D. C. D. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Computational Research Division. (2005) Python Globus (pyGlobus). [Online]. Available: http://dsd.lbl.gov/gtg/projects/pyGlobus/
[32] S. Jha, P. V. Coveney, M. Harvey and R. Pinning, SPICE: Simulated Pore Interactive Computing Environment, Proceedings of ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference 2005, http://sc05.supercomputing.org/schedule/pdf/anal109.pdf http://sc05.supercomputing.org/schedule/pdf/anal109.pdf.
[33] The TeraGyroid Experiment, Accepted for GGF10 Applications Workshop. [Online]. Available: http://www.realitygrid.org/ TeraGyroid-Case-Study-GGF10.pdf, http://www.realitygrid.org/TeraGyroid-Case-Study-GGF10.pdf
[34] R. Berlich, M. Kunze and K. Schwarz, Grid computing in Europe: from research to deployment, in CRPIT ’44: Proceedings of the 2005 Australasian workshop on Grid computing
and e-research.1em plus 0.5em minus 0.4emDarlinghurst, Australia: Australian Computer Society, Inc., pp. 21-27, 2005.
[35] S. D. Team, (2005) Simple API for Grid Applications – Strawman API Version 0.2. [Online]. Available: http://wiki.cct.lsu.edu/saga/space/start/strawman-api-v0.2.pdf
[36] S. Pickles, R. Pinning, A. Porter, G. Riley, R. pert Ford, K. Mayes, D. Snelling, J. Stanton, S. Kenny and S. Jha, The realitygrid computational steering api version 1.1, Reality
Grid, Tech. Rep., 2004, http://www.sve.man.ac.uk/Research/AtoZ/RealityGrid/Steering/ReGsdo5(s)teer ingsdo5(a)pi.pdfe-print.
[37] P. Kacsuk, G. Dózsa, J. Kovács, R. Lovas, N. Podhorszki, Z. Balaton and G. Gombás, P-GRADE: A Grid Programming Environment, Journal of Grid Computing, 2, 171-197 (2003).
