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The Application Hosting Environment (AHE) provides
scientists with application specific services to utilize
grid resources in a quick, transparent manner with the
scientific objective as the main driver of the activity.
The AHE provides resource selection, application
launching, workflow execution, provenance and data-recovery.
The AHE is a lightweight hosting environment for running
unmodified applications - NAMD, LB3D, LAMMPS, DL_POLY
among others, on grid resources like the NGS and TeraGrid.
Applications hosted within the AHE can be further composed
of multiple executables as in coupled model simulations.
The AHE client is a consumer of the AHE Web
services and is designed to be sufficiently light-weight
so as to be deployable on PDAs and mobile phones. The AHE
is designed to provide the scientist with a simple,
consistent and centralised way to control application
instances running on distributed grid resources. The AHE
client is designed with the assumption that -
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the client host does not have globus installed
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the client host is firewalled
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the client host does not save application state
information
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the client host needs to transfer large files between
gsiftp servers in addition to direct data-staging
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the user is not aware of executable or environment
preferences on the particular grid resources
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the user is insulated from middleware installed on the
grid resource
The application services hosted within the AHE are
consistent with the WSRF specification and are
interoperable with other WSRF aware clients. The AHE uses
WSRF::Lite as its middleware. The AHE consumes services
provided by another OMII Managed Programme project,
GridSAM,
which is its interface to backend grid resources.
NEWS: The AHE is now included in the latest version of the OMII stack, 3.2.0. The OMII installer will automatically deploy and configure the AHE, along with WSRF::Lite, a Tomcat server to host the AHE and provide intermediate file staging services, and a back-end PostgreSQL database, speeding up the time taken to deploy the AHE. You can download OMII 3.2.0 here.
A paper entitled "A Lightweight Application Hosting Environment for Grid Computing" has been accepted for publication at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2006. Find this and more AHE related papers on our publications page.
The latest version of the AHE source code, plus documentation and distribution packages can also be obtained from our NeSCForge site. All bugs, support requests and feature requests should be submitted via the NeSCForge site.
There is also a mailing list dedicated to AHE users. If you have any questions on the AHE you should send them here. To subscribe to the mailing list visit http://www.mailinglists.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/ahe-discuss
The development of the AHE is funded by the EPSRC "Rapid Prototyping of
Usable Grid Middleware" Project, GR/T27488/01, and by OMII under the Managed Programme RAHWL project.
Architecture of the AHE
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