DATE,TIME & PLACE: Wednsday, January 14, 2004, 3 pm, Social Sciences Building, Room 108
SSB is the building immediately to the South of SDSC. Enter Room 108 from the East, ground floor.

TALK TITLE: Pegasus: Mapping complex applications onto the Grid

SPEAKER: Ewa Deelman ( deelman@isi.edu ), Research Team Leader,
Center for Grid Technologies, USC Information Sciences Institute

SPEAKER HOST: Bertram Ludaescher ( ludaesch@sdsc.edu )

ABSTRACT:
Grid computing promises users the ability to harness the power of large
numbers of heterogeneous, distributed resources: computing resources, data
storage systems, instruments, etc. The vision is to enable users and
applications to seamlessly access these resources to solve complex,
large-scale problems. Scientific, data-intensive applications are no longer
being developed as monolithic codes. Instead, standalone application
components are combined to process the data in various ways. The
applications can now be viewed as complex workflows, which consist of
various transformations performed on the data. Because of the large amounts
of computation and data involved, these workflows require the power of the
Grid to execute efficiently. In the current environment, users need to
discover resources manually and schedule the jobs directly onto the Grid,
essentially composing detailed workflow descriptions by hand. This leaves
users struggling with the complexity of the Grid and weighing which
resources to use, where to run the computations, where to access the data,
etc.

This talk describes Pegasus, which stands for Planning for Execution in
Grids. Pegasus was developed at ISI as part of the GriPhyN project. Pegasus
is a configurable system that can map and execute complex workflows on the
Grid. Pegasus takes an abstract description of a workflow and finds the
appropriate data and Grid resources to execute the workflow. Pegasus can
take into account dynamic information about existing data products as well
as the available system resources. To date Pegasus has been used in a
variety of data-intensive applications ranging from high-energy physics,
gravitational-wave physics, astronomy and others.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Ewa Deelman is a Research Team Leader at the Center for Grid Technologies at
the USC Information Sciences Institute and an Assistant Research Professor
at the USC Computer Science Department. Dr. Deelman's research interests
include the design and exploration of collaborative scientific environments
based on Grid technologies, with particular emphasis on workflow management
as well as the management of large amounts of data and metadata. At ISI, Dr.
Deelman is part of the Globus project, which designs and implements
middleware for the Grid. Dr. Deelman received her PhD from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in Computer Science in 1997 in the area of parallel
discrete event simulation.