The Otho Toolkit: ASKALON's "Service-Enabler"
Automated Generation of Executor Services (XS) from resource-intensive scientific Legacy Applications
A large set of resource-intensive and performance-oriented scientific applications are available in the shape of task-oriented, often command-line-oriented, programs that follow a (file-based) input-output schema. Such program setups allow using job and resource management systems as gateways to various kinds of computational resources such as shared- and distributed memory machines and clusters, Computational Grid resources etc. Service-oriented architectures promise to ease application integration, to overcome heterogeneity issues and has strong industry support making them a good candidate also for scientific communities with compute-intensive problems. The Otho Toolkit aims at building a bridge between these two worlds, combining advantages and hiding disadvantages. It transforms a formal description of task-oriented programs into multiple types of Scientific Grid Application Services. The resulting application services hide all technical details behind an application-specific interface and are tailor-made and fully customized for the target Grid site/host.
The Otho Toolkit: its archetype
| The Otho Toolkit is named after Otho, a member of starship Comet's crew commanded by Captain Future invented by Mort Weisinger from the US Pulp magazine published in the early 1940s. Otho is a shapeshifter android able to change appearance at will. The Otho Toolkit envisions to give this capability to legacy applications via automatic generation of custom and tailor-made Executor Services (XS) in various forms and adaptations. |
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Supported Target Platforms
- WS-I Services with Apache Axis
- WS-I Services with Apache Axis2
- WSRF Services with Globus Toolkit 4
- ASG Platform (based on J2EE EJB and JBoss)
- Several job execution/resource manager mechanisms: local exec, ssh-exec, IBM LoadLeveler, Globus GRAM
- Extensible with additional platforms and customizable to specific needs
Available Features
- Generates a flexible build and deployment mechanism
- Generats Interfaces and Service implementation
- Optionally adds filestaging capabilities
- Optionally generates interface-specific command-line client
- Optionally generates interface-specific web-based client
- Optionally generates monitoring services for backend, container and service
- Optionally generates GSI credential management service
- Full Automatation possible
- All input are file-based and in XML format with XSD definitions
- Feature selection and configuration given by user or best-effort selection for target system
- Rich-client GUI
- Web-based GUI
- usable via API, as WSRF-compliant service, via commandline clients (use API), rich GUI client (use WSRF-service as backend) or Web-based GUI
Screenshots
How to use the Otho Toolkit
- via Java API
the core of Otho are a couple of java libraries packaged as jar-files that can be integrated for programmatical use into other applications - via Commandline Client
Otho ships with easy-to-use textual commandline clients (built on top of the APIs) intended for end-users - as Batch (Grid) Job
The Otho Toolkit is designed such that it can be used in local and global resource management systems such as e.g. Globus GRAM, PBS, LSF, etc - as WSRF service
We used the Otho Toolkit recursively to create a WSRF service from itself (its commandline client). The resulting service was customized and extended and offers the complete Otho functionality to Grid environments as WSRF service. - via rich-client GUI
We are building a comfortable, multi-platform rich graphical user interface intended for end-users. It is realized as RCP/SWT application using the WSRF-service as backend. - via web-based GUI
a comfortable, web-based graphical user interface intended for end-users of Otho Toolkit.
Related Publications
- see Publications
