Grid Acronyms

From BeSTGRID

There are many acronyms used in the Grid world, in particular as names of software packages. Below are the ones used the most frequently in the VDT.

[edit] Grid Related Acronyms

Acronym	Meaning	More information
SRB	Storage Resource Broker	single file hierarchy for data distributed across multiple storage systems. http://www.sdsc.edu/srb/index.php/Main_Page]
RFT	Reliable File Transfer	Grid file transfer service
VDT	Virtual Data Toolkit	A collection of grid software, including the Globus Toolkit and other services
VDS	Virtual Data System	provides a language (VDL, Virtual Data Language) to specify how to construct grid workflows to derive data.
DRM	Disk Resource Manager
PBS	Portable Batch System	a job management system. Current open source version is available as Torque
MPI	Message Passing Interface	a specification for parallel computation libraries. Implementations include LAM/MPI, MPICH-2 and IBM POE
PVM	Parallel Virtual Machine	a parallel computation library
VOMS	Virtual Organization Membership Service	User management service included in VDT
VOX	Virtual Organization Management Service eXtension	A project to extend VOMS, http://www.uscms.org/SoftwareComputing/Grid/VO/
VOMRS	Virtual Organization Membership Registration Service	registration workflow on top of VOMS, part of VOX
AUP	Acceptable Use Policy	Advertised by a VO and agreed by the user upon joining the VO
GRAM	Grid Resource Allocation & Management Protocol	The core Web Service specification for interaction of Globus Toolkit components
MDS	Monitoring and Discovery Service
CEMon	Computing Element Monitoring	"There are plans to use CEMon in Open Science Grid as part of a Resource Site Selector. CEmon will publish information about all sites as ClassAds to a Condor matchmaker, which can then be optionally used for deciding which sites Condor-G submission should go to."
GIP	Generic Information Provider	collects information about system (e.g., batch) and publishes it (eg., in MDS). Can be used as a sensor for CEMon.
MIP	Moduler Information Provider	Used in APACGrid for Resource Information Services
GRIS	Grid Resource Information Service	GRISes running on the NG1 VMs will be indexed by the APAC Grid Information Index Service (GIIS) running on VPAC's NG1 VM.
GIIS	Grid Information Index Service	SAPAC will be running a secondary APAC GIIS for fault tolerance purposes.
MomALISA	MONitoring Agents using a Large Integrated Services Architecture	Monitor all grid sites and aggregate.
GSI	Grid Security Infrastructure
GUMS	Grid User Management System	GUMS is a "grid identity mapping service". It replaces the Globus grid-mapfile and it will map users (X509 certificate distinguished names, plus perhaps a VOMS role) to a user. It can obtains lists of users from an LDAP server, a VOMS server, or from manual configuration. ... a callout from Globus must be used. In the VDT, we provide PRIMA for this purpose.
PRIMA	PRIvilege Management and Authorization	is an implementation of the Globus authorization callout.
GASS	Global Access to Secondary Storage	A file access API and library for transparently accessing remote storage (e.g., via GridFTP). Data Movement and Management
RLS	Replica Location Service	maintains mapping from logical file names ("Alain's dataset") to physical file names (gsiftp://grid.example.com/alain_dataset).
OGSA	Open Grid Services Architecture	A collection of Web Services specifications for Grid infrastructure, used in the Globus Toolkit. OGSA was first suggested in a seminal paper by Ian Foster called "The Physiology of the Grid"
WSRF	WS-Resource Framework	http://www.globus.org/wsrf/
OGF	Open Grid Forum	Organization currently developing the Globus Toolkit. http://www.ogf.org/
GGF	Global Grid Forum	Organization formerly developing the Globus Toolkit. Merged into OGF.
BIRN	Biomedical Informatics Research Network	Community offering bioinformatics resources. http://www.nbirn.net/
LCG	The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid
KX509	Kerberos and X509 integration	X509 certificate issued based on a Kerberos ticket.
GPT	Grid Packaging Tools	packaging system: .tar.gz with build/install/config/uninstall information - http://www.globus.org/grid_software/packaging/gpt.php
GoG	Commodity Grid	Administer grids from a higher level framework. http://www.globus.org/cog/

[edit] Non-acronym VDT/Globus components

Package name	More information
Condor	batch job system
Clarens	Clarens is a software framework that makes it easy to write stateless, secure, high-performance web services in Python. (+ jClarens for Java)
GlueSchema(2.0)	The GLUE Schema is an abstract modeling for Grid resources and mapping to concrete schemas that can be used in Grid Information Services. https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/EGEE/GlueSchema20
FTSH	alternative shell, has primitives for "try this action 5 times", or "try this for 15 minutes" (especially useful for GRID)
UberFTP	is a convenient, interactive interface to GridFTP (cf. globus-url-copy).
MyProxy	Use short-term certificates based on a long-lived certificate (stored in MyProxy), with automatic renewal for services permitted.
pyGlobus	interface to use Globus from Python
NetLogger	methodology and tools to debug and analyze performance of complex distributed applications
Grix	The Grix client tool is used to request and manage your APACGrid certificate/identity. http://grid.apac.edu.au/HowTo/grix

[edit] Further reading

From Globus/VDT webpage:

"A number of tools function along with Globus to make Grid computing a more robust platform, useful to high-performance computing communities. They include:"

• WebCom and WebCom-G [5]
• Gridbus Grid Service Broker
• Grid Portal Software such as GridPort, OGCE and GridSphere
• Grid Packaging Toolkit (GPT)
• MPICH-G2 (Grid Enabled MPI)
• Network Weather Service (NWS) (Quality-of-Service monitoring and

statistics)

• Condor (CPU Cycle Scavenging) and Condor-G (Job Submission)
• HPC4U Middleware (Fault Tolerant and SLA aware Grid Middleware)
• GridWay metascheduler
• More information on Grid computing at Wikipedia.