Dear Andrew and others, we too here in Leiden have such an initiative and are allready deploying our system for some of our user groups. We created a general web based grid service that allows you to hook in any application on a cluster. Our infrastructure is "application based" and if your users only use a few apps, you might find it rather usefull.
The users now interact to a grid of clusters through, perhaps a basic interface on the web, or through a more advanced java app or i.e. on the command line like I prefer to do so ;-). The infrastructure uses x509 certificates for security and is implemented using Apache, MySQL and PHP on the web server side with a c++ coded daemon running in userspace (not as root but as a cluster user!) using the STL with libCURL on the cluster (grid resource) itself. It shouldn't be to hard for a regular sysadmin to install and maintain that for the few relevant applications your users tend to use... If you are interested, we are about to test run programs like VASP, Gaussian and ADF on our own clusters through this infrastructure somewere this month. Currently we have the infrastructure already running on two of our own clusters, two national supercomputers in the Netherlands (without even having to have had root privileges or asking any administrator anything ;-p), on a few laptops and my own test machine. It runs a 'hello world' hooking into Torque / PBS, Load Leveler or just forks the executable. More information can be found at http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/docs where you can find a presentation I gave last month in Leiden and Amsterdam and the original design / work document I wrote to keep me from forgetting all the details ;-). At http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/daemon you can browse through the deamon source code and if you want I can send you a personal test certificate with a key (PKCS12) so you can use your browser to browse through the basic web interface at https://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/basic_interface Oh on http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/docs/screen_shots you can see screenshots of the basic interface and the command line interface in action... On http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/daemon/LGI.cfg you can see how easy it is to configure the daemon on a resource and on http://fwnc7003.leidenuniv.nl/LGI/daemon/LGI.log you can see the log it produces... Best wishes, Mark Somers. -- Dr. M. F. Somers Theoretical Chemistry - Leiden Institute of Chemistry - Leiden University Einsteinweg 55, P.B. 9502, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands tel: +31715274437 mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web: http://rulgla.leidenuniv.nl/Researchers/Somers.htm room: HB322 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
