Section: Application Domains

The CIMENT project

Participant : Olivier Richard.

The CIMENT project (Intensive Computing, Numerical Modeling and Technical Experiments, http://ciment.ujf-grenoble.fr/ ) gathers a wide scientific community involved in numerical modeling and computing (from numerical physics and chemistry to astrophysics, mechanics, bio-modeling and imaging) and the distributed computer science teams from Grenoble. Among these various application domains, there is a huge demand to manage executions of large sets of independent jobs. These sets have between 10,000 to 100,000 jobs each. Providing a middleware able to steer such an amount of jobs is a challenge. The CiGri middleware project addresses this issue in a grid infrastructure.

The aim of the CiGri project is to gather the unused computing resource from intranet infrastructure and to make it available for large scale applications. This grid is based on two software tools. The CiGri server software is based on a database and offers a user interface for launching grid computations (scripts and web tools). It interacts with the computing clusters through a batch scheduler software. CiGri is compatible with classical batch systems like PBS, but an efficient batch software (OAR , http://oar.imag.fr/ ) has been developed by the MESCAL and MOAIS project-teams for the easy integration and testing of scheduling tools.