Andrew Grimshaw - Indiana University

Andrew Grimshaw
University of Virginia, Open Grid Forum
Monday, March 9, 2015
12:00 noon
Georgian Room, IMU
The XSEDE Wide-Area Virtual Environment: Breaking
Down Barriers to Secure Resource Sharing
Abstract: The XSEDE architecture is a standards-based, integrated, secure, distributed systems architecture
that provides an easy-to-use, robust environment for resource sharing. Unlike tool-kit-based approaches, the
XSEDE architecture leverages a few simple abstractions in a reliable, integrated virtual environment, thus
reducing the amount of cruft for end-users and programmers.
Borrowing from Plan 9, the single most important abstraction is the path-based naming and binding scheme.
We use a three-level naming scheme (paths, identifiers, and addresses) in order to provide location, migration,
replication, failure, and implementation transparency. All resources are named with paths, including files,
directories, compute clusters, running jobs, and user and group identities.
In this talk I will describe the key features of the XSEDE architecture, including the Global Federated File
System (GFFS) and the Execution Management Services (EMS).
Biography: Andrew Grimshaw received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in
1988. He joined the University of Virginia as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, becoming Associate
Professor in 1994 and Professor in 1999. He is the chief designer and architect of Mentat, Legion, Genesis II,
and the co-architect for XSEDE. In 1999 he co-founded Avaki Corporation, and served as its Chairman and
Chief Technical Officer until 2003. In 2003 he won the Frost and Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. In
2008 he became the founding director of the University of Virginia Alliance for Computational Science and
Engineering (UVACSE). The mission of UVACSE is to change the culture of computation at the University of
Virginia and to accelerate computationally oriented research.
Andrew is the president of the Open Grid Forum (OGF), having served both as a member of the OGF's Board
of Directors and as Architecture Area Director. Andrew is the author or co-author of over 100 publications and
book chapters. His current projects are Genesis II and XSEDE. Genesis II, is an open source, standardsbased, Grid system that focuses on making Grids easy-to-use and accessible to non computer-scientists.
XSEDE (eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) is the NSF follow-on to the TeraGrid
project.