Report On the Third GRID Plugtests

November 27 2006 - 1st December 2006 th, 2006
during GRIDs@Work week.

3rd PLUGTESTS?, a Successful GRID Interoperability Event with Real Life Applications

From the 27th November to the 1st December 2006, INRIA, ETSI (hosting the event), and the European Project CoreGRID (managed by ERCIM) successfully brought together the European Grid Community at the 3rd PLUGTESTS? and GRID@Work Event on the French Riviera-Grid researchers, industrials and users-gathering more than 200 participants from many different countries.

The centre piece of the week has been the two PLUGTESTS? contests, FlowShops and N-Queens organised by Denis Caromel, the director of OASIS and creator of ProActive, and his research team from INRIA-University of Nice Sophia Antipolis-CNRS I3S. A specific configured GRID infrastructure was set up, given the heterogeneousness of the Grid's sites; each one had to be configured and fine tuned. This GRID was deployed on 15 different countries including China, in more than 40 sites, gathering 4146 CPUS!

ProActive, an Open Source Java Library hosted by ObjectWeb, is an application enabler for Service Oriented Architecture that is able to deploy onto heterogeneous international Grid solutions (grid5000, EGEE, Nordugrid?) and optimise the inter-working of different Grid Standard protocols such as ssh, Globus, WRSF-OGSA, Web services, Jini, LSF, PBS, rsh, Unicore, EGEE, gLite?

Ten teams for the contests came from most continents. The deployment was thus made very simple and transparent for the Plugtests? users, who had all the architecture details hidden by the ProActive layer. The first place was awarded to the Japanese team from University of Tokyo who won both contests.

For the Flowshop06 contest, 'Kanban System' was able to go ten times faster than last year! Each team had 1 hour to run their application on the Grid to solve Taillard's instances of the FlowShop problem-this contest enables the industrial users to reduce costs and bring forth best program Grid aware applications. The winners were able to achieve this in 553 seconds with 207 workers.

For the N-Queens contest, the Japanese winners 'Eight Samourai' have been able to compute 6467 billions of solutions deployed on 2193 CPUs, and found the N=22 challenge in 31minutes and 13 seconds. It is three times better than last year.

For the Chinese teams, both Tsinghua University and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications have won second place for the two contests. The result for the N-Queens contest is 5000 billions of solutions deployed on 680 CPUs with N=22 Queens in 32minutes; and for the FlowShop contest they achieved this in 13760 seconds with 86 workers.

These two Plugtests? give the opportunity to develop new and interesting features, while testing the middleware ProActive at a new level of complexity. Also it brings forth the right tools for industrials that will help them reduce time to market and speed up the standardization process. ProActive takes advantage of the heterogeneous Grid in a both simple and transparent way.

Given the real life applications of the 3rd Plugtests? and 3rd GRIDs@Work Event, we would like to encourage a wider community involvement, including North America for example. This year, Europe as a whole, was very pleased to welcome the two Chinese teams from Tsinghua and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

We are all looking forward to getting important feedback on the deployment and interoperability of Grid applications on various Grids. CoreGRID, the European Research Network of Excellence gathering more than 300 researchers from 23 different scientific workshops with close industrials links, as Franco Accordino of the European Commission stated "it is the GRID lighthouse for the world", and today CoreGRID means ONE integrated center with a single goal that present a united front to the world.

Last but not the least; we thank our sponsors and European partners for their financial support: ObjectWeb, INRIA, I3S, European Commission, Microsoft, Platform Computing, SUN Microsystems, IBM, Linux RedFlag, HP and Oracle. Their serious involvement in this event is a showcase of a real strategic interest in European research and value to the European and worldwide ICT Industry.



Notes to editor:

http://www.inria.fr/ INRIA, French National Research Institute in Computer Science and Control, is the main player in the Grid domain with more than 15 teams over 8 different sites and has been active in the set up of the Grid'5000 infrastructure.

http://www.etsi.org/ ETSI unites 654 members from 61 countries, including manufacturers, network operators, administrations, service providers, research bodies and users - in fact, all the key players in the ICT arena.

http:///www.etsi.org/plugtests/ The ETSI Plugtests Service is a professional service that specializes in the organization of interoperability events for telecommunication / Internet / Information Technology standards.

http://www.coregrid.net/ CoreGRID is the European Research Network of Excellence on foundations, software infrastructures and applications for large-scale, distributed Grid and peer-to-peer technologies. Funded by the European Union, CoreGrid aims at building a European-wide research laboratory whose long-term objective is to identify the foundations for next generation Grids.