Meta-Scheduler

The deployment of a Meta-Scheduler arises from the need for a grid-wide scheduler to ease the submission and scheduling of jobs to the NGPP compute clusters. Each of the NGPP compute clusters have their own local workload schedulers (e.g. Sun’s N1GE and Platform’s LSF). The need to find a scheduler that interfaces to these local schedulers is important. The NGPP Meta-Scheduler has been deployed by PTC Systems Pte Ltd using the LSF Meta-Scheduler from Platform Computing.

The Meta-Scheduler has a web interface that allows users to submit and monitor jobs sent to the various compute clusters on NGPP. This provides users an easier and more intuitive interface as compared to the command-line interface.

Interfacing Portals to Meta-Scheduler

Virtual Grid Communities have their own grid portals (e.g. Digital Media Grid portal). These portals provide simple user interfaces to selected applications (e.g. Cel-Animation and POV-Ray for the Digital Media Grid portal). Currently, a user has to manually select the compute resource to run the application. With the NGPP Meta-Scheduler, one can leave the complexity of scheduling the job to the best available computer cluster.

Applications available on NGPP using Meta-Scheduler

Based on the list of applications required by the domain-specific portals as well as applications which NGPP users have expressed interest in, the NGCC will enable these applications to be installed across the NGPP computer clusters. At present, the NGCC has made POV-Ray and GridBLAST available.