Main goal of this project is to provide a sustainable support and framework to gridify, deploy and execute scientific applications - coming from three different domains: life science, environment and art - on the Virtual EZ Grid platform.

(See also Virtual EZ-Grid)

Goals

MUSIC aims at bringing together several Swiss higher education institutes by means of a shared high-performance computing platform called XtremWeb-CH (XWCH) utilised in the Virtual EZ Grid platform.
The concrete objectives are:

1. extending and enriching the current XWCH platform set-up in the Virtual EZ Grid project,
2. gridifying and deploying three scientific applications coming from three different disciplines: life science (phylogeny), environment and art,
3. extending the ARC-XWCH bridge (developed in the Virtual EZ Grid project) so that the Run Time Environments (RTE) which are available for SMSCG users could be supported by the Virtual EZ Grid platform.

The project team will set up a set of software tools used to assist users to gridify, deploy, execute and monitor user applications. These tools will allow easy and relatively intuitive use of grid technology by the targeted communities. The tools will not be developed but "packaged".
The integration of the Virtual EZ Grid platform with the SMSCG Swiss grid platform will be strengthened by enhancing the interoperability of the two middlewares XWCH and ARC.
Three concrete scientific application targeting three different users communities (life science, environment and art) will be gridified and deployed:

• MetaPIGA application (robust implementation of several stochastic heuristics for large phylogeny inference; handles nucleic-acid and protein datasets as well as morphological data)
• Geospatial processing on a desktop Grid infrastructure (set up a Grid workflow for PREVIEW Global Risk Data Platform)
• SmartPen - ImageRecognition - XWCH indexing (finding and storing image features; indexing of drawings created with penSmartPen and retrieving of images with GIFT).

The bridging with SMSCG comprises porting at least one SMSCG application into XWCH, and providing an improved ARC-XWCH adaptor that will show XWCH modules as ARC runtime environments.

Benefit

• simplifying use and reducing "operating costs" of the Virtual EZ Grid platform,
• bringing new scientific communities to use Grid technology and,
• improving the integration of the XWCH platform in the SMSCG platform.

The scientific communities will profit by the gridfication of new applications, the resulting performance and availability, better usability and fail-over handling.
The integration of the desktop grid system into the national infrastructure will add value for both.