eMinerals project escience tools

Environment from the Molecular Level

A NERC eScience testbed project

eMinerals tools

The eMinerals project makes use of a number of mainstram middleware and application tools, including the Globus toolkit, Condor, San Diego's Storage Resource Broker (SRB), Gridsam and the OMII middleware stack, and the Access Grid.

The eMinerals minigrid infrastructure is primarily based on these standard middleware tools. However, in order to exploit the potential of grid computing and of working as a virtual organisation, we have developed a number of our own tools. These include:

my_condor_submit (MCS), a grid job submission tools based on globus and using the Condor-G wrapping of Globus job submission commands. MCS includes integration with the SRB, automatic metadata capture through interaction with the RCommands tool (see below), and metascheduling within the eMinerals minigrid and to external grid resources such as campus grids and the National Grid Service.
Combinatorial job creation and submission tools, based on the use of MCS.
A web services wrapping of MCS called RMCS (R for remote), enabling scientists to submit jobs from their desktops.
A Gridsam replica of MCS that uses BPEL to define workflows.
TobysSRB, a web interface to the SRB that supports automatic display of SVG data files.
FoX, a library of routines to enable writing of XML output from within Fortran application codes.
ccViz, a tool for displaying XML simulation output files in XHTML, including an embedding of SVG representation of simulation results.
Pelote, an XML representation for constructing graphs from x,y data to be displayed as SVG plots.
RCommands, an infrastructure including a central database, a set of unix shell commands and a web interface, for creating, managing and manipulating metdata associated with files and collections of files stored within the distributed resources of a data grid. The package includes tools for searching for files based on their metadata.
MAST, a multicast application sharing tool that works as an Access Grid service to enable participants in an Access Grid session to share applications.

Many of these tools are now reasonable robust, and hence we offer them to the community. Licences vary, but they are all generous and any restrictions are determined by dependencies on libraries used.