Roland Geisler


Hello, my name is Roland Geisler and I am a visting researcher from the computer science department of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

In August 1999 I visited the Real Time System Laboratory of the Electrotechnical Laboratory(ETL) in Tskuba, Japan. During my visit I presented an introduction to the following topics to researchers at ETL:

Below you can find a short abstract, the main topics of my presentation and quick links to these topics. If you have any further questions about it please feel free to contact me or members of the Globus or DSRT team.

Introduction to Globus

Abstract:
The Globus project is a multi-institutional research effort which seeks to enable the construction of computational grids providing pervasive, dependable, and consistent access to high-performance computational resources, independent of geographical distribution of resources and user. The computational grid technology will give multimedia and computation-orientated applications new opportunities for distributed computing, execution, application steering and visualization. Continuous advances in networking technology and computational infrastructure make it possible today to construct large-scale high performance distributed computing environments -- also called computational grids. They provide access to high-performance resources such as high-speed networks, high-performance computers and large storage systems. These grids have the potential to fundamentally change how we think of computing. We will no longer be restricted to our local resources, because we will be able to integrate complex analysis, image processing and real-time control into scientific instruments such as microscopes or telescopes. To a large extent, the development of usable computational grids is complicated not by available hardware capabilities but by limitations in the software abstractions and services that are currently in use. The success of computational grids will depend on the existence of grid-specific middleware that addresses the needs of computations including dynamic resource allocation, heterogeneous computational communication software and the necessary monitoring and steering tools to ensure proper execution

Presentation topics:
The Globus Grid Programming Toolkit
The Metacomputing Directory Service (MDS) from Globus
Demonstration of the MDS
Colliding Neutron Stars, a metacomputing Globus Application

Links:
Globus Homepage
Collaborators for Globus
Application Support and Training for Globus


Introduction to the DSRT

Abstract:
The DSRT is a user-level soft real-time scheduling server in the Solaris/SunOS operating system. It is based on the changing priority mechanism introduced in the user-level real-time scheduler in UNIX. The highest possible fixed priority is reserved for the DSRT and only one real-time process runs at the second highest fixed priority at any given time. Periodically the scheduler wakes up and schedules the process based on a scheduling algorithm such as rate monotonic or dynamic Earliest Deadline First (EDF) algorithm. If there is no real-time process waiting to run in the system, the scheduler goes to sleep and a non-real-time process with dynamic priority is scheduled using the normal time-sharing scheduler. If real-time processes are waiting, the scheduler changes the current state of the active real-time process from running state to waiting state and picks a waiting real-time process from the waiting pool based on the scheduling algorithm used. The scheduler changes the priority of the scheduled real-time process to the second highest fixed priority and goes back to sleep. The Dynamic Soft Real Time Scheduler was developed by Hao-hua Chu at the Multimedia Operating System and Networking Group (MONET) under Prof. Klara Nahrstedt at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Presentation topics:
The Dynamic Soft Real Time Scheduler (DSRT)
Remote Distributed Monitor for the DSRT using the Globus MDS (powerpoint slides)

Links:
DSRT Homepage
Monet Homepage