1. A Geographically-Distributed, Assignment-Structured Undergraduate Grid Computing Course Mark A. Holliday, Barry Wilkinson, Jeffrey House, Samir Daoud, Dept of Mathematics and Computer Science Western Carolina University Clayton Ferner Dept of Computer Science UNC at Wilmington SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education Saint Louis, MO February 25, 2005

2. 2/25/05 2 Acknowledgements Thank-you for financial support from  Introducing Grid Computing into the Undergraduate Curriculum, National Science Foundation, DUE 0410667, 2004-2006.  A Consortium to Promote Computational Science and High Performance Computing, University of North Carolina Office of the President, 2004-2006.  Fostering Undergraduate Research Partnerships through a Graphical User Environment for the North Carolina Computing Grid, University of North Carolina Office of the President, 2004-2006.

3. 2/25/05 3 Overview  What is Grid Computing?  Motivation for the Course(s)  The Fall 2004 Course  The Spring 2005 Course  Possible Future Directions  Conclusions  For Further Information

4. 2/25/05 4 What is Grid Computing? Grid computing is "coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations" (Foster, Kesselman, and Tuecke, 2001)

5. 2/25/05 5 What is Grid Computing? Thus, grid computing  virtualizes the resources at geographically distributed and often heterogeneous sites.  such resources include computational devices, data storage, and instrumentation and sensors

6. 2/25/05 6 What is Grid Computing? Advantage of Grid Computing?  More efficient use of the resources by allowing remote and transparent access Why now?  Increased Internet bandwidth  Recent development of key open standards

7. 2/25/05 7 What is Grid Computing?  Other approaches to wide-area distributed systems have been progressing concurrently  The Grid approach is converging with the Web Services approach – HTTP, XML – SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) – WSDL (Web Services Description Language)

8. 2/25/05 8 What is Grid Computing? (from Mark Baker, “Smoke and Mirrors: Tales of the Grid”, 28 October 2004) Grid Web WSRF OGSI GT2 GT1 HTTP WSDL, WS-* WSDL 2, WSDM

9. 2/25/05 9 Motivation for the Course(s)  Grid computing has matured to the point that a course aimed at the undergraduate, upper- level computer science major is feasible and desirable  Such a course should have – a coherent, unified set of lectures – be organized around a set of hands-on programming assignments – (ideally) and involve multiple sites

10. 2/25/05 10 The Fall 2004 Course  Fall 2003 – first implementation of the grid software used in SC 2003 contest (GT2.4)  Spring 2004 and Summer 2004 – re-implemented the software (GT3.2) – developed the lectures – developed the programming assignments  Fall 2004 – Course Offered Instructors: Barry Wilkinson and Clayton Ferner forty students at nine universities

11. 2/25/05 11 The Fall 2004 Course

12. 2/25/05 12 The Fall 2004 Course

13. 2/25/05 13 The Fall 2004 Course

14. 2/25/05 14 The Fall 2004 Course  Software Environment (Open Source) – Linux and Java – Apache Tomcat (Java Servlet Container) – Apache Axis (SOAP Engine) – NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) distribution current Globus Toolkit Version (3.2) Condor-G many other packages

15. 2/25/05 15 The Fall 2004 Course First four assignments were developed together  Create a service – A Web service (assignment one) – A Grid Service (assignment two)  Job Submission – Using Globus Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM) (assignment three) – Using Condor-G (assignment four)

16. 2/25/05 16 The Fall 2004 Course Assignment One: A Web Service  Provide the source code for a simple MyMath service – a method that returns the square of its argument  Use Apache Axis to generate all the other needed server source files  Compile the server files  Create client source and compile  Execute the client to access the service  Redo (by student) with an extended service

17. 2/25/05 17 The Fall 2004 Course Assignment Two: A Grid Service  Provide the source code for a stateful MyMath service  Write the WSDL file for the server explicitly (not using Axis)  Build (using Ant) and deploy the service  Compile the client  Start the container on a free TCP port  In a second shell run the client  Redo (by student) with an extended service

18. 2/25/05 18 The Fall 2004 Course Assignment Three: GRAM Job Submission  Learn RSL-2 (Resource Specification Language) and its use in the test.xml file (to run /bin/echo)  Start a container on a free TCP port  In a second shell start a proxy process – for certificates  Submit the job specified via test.xml  Redo (by student) with a new job – student written Java echo program – student modified test.xml file

19. 2/25/05 19 The Fall 2004 Course Assignment Four: Condor-G Job Submissions  Learn submit description file format  Start a proxy process  Submit the job using condor  Monitor and manage the job and the condor pool using various condor commands  Redo (by student) using a new job written, compiled, and executed

20. 2/25/05 20 The Fall 2004 Course  Assignment Five: MPI programming – prepared but not assigned  Assignment Six: Workflow Editor (GridNexus)

21. 2/25/05 21 The Fall 2004 Course Experiences  Carefully tested the first four assignments in the summer with one user  Multiple users in the pre-course workshop: servlet container is very memory intensive  Last minute addition to assignment three was too difficult  Maintaining the software and helping the students with questions was very time- intensive

22. 2/25/05 22 The Spring 2005 Course  Students using the grid in an application domain  Course Title: Intelligent Decision Making  Problem-solving using optimization algorithms implemented in the open source AMPL (A Mathematical Programming Language) programming environment

23. 2/25/05 23 The Spring 2005 Course  Co-taught by myself at WCU and two faculty at Elon University (David Powell and Joel Hollingsworth)  Three sites: WCU, Elon, and Appalachian State University (teleconferencing)  Two clusters: WCU and Elon (both running GT 3.2)

24. 2/25/05 24 The Spring 2005 Course Partially reverse the assignment order from the Fall 2004 course 1. Run an ampl model as a GRAM job submission 2. Run an ampl model as a Condor-G job submission 3. Make an ampl model a grid service that is accessed by one or more clients

25. 2/25/05 25 Possible Future Directions  DAGMan: specify a dependency graph across related job submissions to create a workflow and use GridFTP to transfer results between the jobs  Portals  Storage-oriented grids – E-Diamond Project, AstroGrid

26. 2/25/05 26 Conclusions  Wide-area distributed systems with a foundation of HTTP and XML are developing and converging as web services and grids  Undergraduate courses for computer science majors in this area are becoming feasible and desirable  Our experiences and the assignments we have developed hopefully will be helpful to others

27. 2/25/05 27 For Further Information Fall 2004 Course Materials http://cs.wcu.edu/~abw/CS493F04/index.html Spring 2005 Course Materials holliday@email.wcu.edu