Abstract:
Grid computing has gained popularity as the emerging architecture for next-generation high performance distributed computing with the goal of providing ubiquitous access to distributed HPC resources that are shared between multiple organizations through "virtualization" and "aggregation." Grid middleware provides a standard set of services for authentication, authorization, resource allocation and management, job submission and monitoring, as well as data transfer and management. However, scheduling applications across multiple heterogeneous resources - often referred to as metascheduling - is a challenging task that has to consider heterogeneity and availability of the resources as well as load balancing and application specific characteristics to achieve maximum performance and utilization. This talk provides an overview of the different issues involved in metascheduling, describes some of the techniques developed to address these issues, and presents the application of these techniques to bioinformatics applications along with performance results. DynamicBLAST - a grid-enabled version of the popular bioinformatics application BLAST will be used as an example to illustrate how these techniques were used for metascheduling BLAST on the UABgrid and SURAgrid resources.

Biography:
Purushotham V. Bangalore is an Assistant Professor and Director of Collaborative Computing Laboratory (CCL) in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). At UAB he leads research in the area of Grid programming environments and application development frameworks and teaches Distributed Computing, Parallel Computing, and Grid Computing. Prior to joining UAB in Fall of 2003, he worked as a Research Associate at the Engineering Research Center at Mississippi State University where he worked on several areas of high performance computing and grid computing including scalable algorithms, object-oriented libraries, message-passing middleware, multidisciplinary applications, and integration systems.

Dr. Bangalore received a Ph.D. in Computational Engineering in May 2003 from Mississippi State University in Computational Engineering. He also has a M.S. degree in Computer Science (May 1995) from Mississippi State University and B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering (October 1991) from Bangalore University, India.