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Frontier Grid Platform

So secure, reliable and easy-to-use, all you experience is power.

The Frontier Grid Platform is the collection of software used to manage the Parabon Computation Grid. Packaged as Frontier Enterprise, it is the same solution we deploy for organizations wanting an in-house compute utility. It's secure, OS-agnostic, unobtrusive and comes with a rich set of development tools to facilitate the rapid development of high-performance grid applications.

The Components

Regardless of whether you're accessing Frontier Grid Services online or within your enterprise, Frontier works the same way. In simplistic terms, the major components are:

1. The Frontier Grid Server, which provides Frontier Grid Services to users and developers, is at the center of any Frontier grid - be it the public Parabon Computation Grid, or an in-house Frontier Enterprise grid.
2. Frontier Applications are available for a number of problem domains - from financial forecasting and data mining to biological and nano-scale modeling and simulations, and more. Some of these applications have been designed to run within the Frontier Dashboard - a browser-based web interface that provides an intuitive front-end to the Frontier Grid Platform. Others operate as grid-powered desktop applications and still others are packaged as plug-ins to applications such as Microsoft^® Excel^®
3. Frontier developer tools - including the Frontier Software Development Kit (SDK) and Eclipse IDE Plug-In - enable software engineers to create their own custom Frontier-enabled applications. Other tool-kits exist that provide frameworks for rapidly integrating existing applications with Frontier and also for performing evolutionary computation.
4. Finally, the Frontier Compute Engine is the provider-side application that runs on each grid node (computer) to actually perform the work. The Compute Engine is designed to be unobtrusive - only executing tasks when the computer is otherwise idle.

What follows is a more detailed discussion of how these components fit together.

An In-Depth Look

We start with the "heart and soul" of the Frontier Grid Platform - the Frontier Grid Server. It schedules tasks, coordinates compute and data resources, and guarantees task execution, even in the presence of unreliable nodes.

• The public Parabon Computation Grid connects systems around the world, and provides the most scalable Computation on Demand^SM solution available.
  • By contracting with providers and institutions around the world, Parabon provides an "always on" compute grid, capable of running massively parallel HPC jobs any time, day or night.
  • In addition, by keeping excess capacity on reserve at all times, the Parabon Computation Grid provides tremendous scalability, allowing researchers to boost performance in order to speed discovery and dramatically reduce the time it takes to perform mission-critical calculations and simulations.
• Organizations and agencies unwilling (or unable) to utilize public resources can still harness the power of their own computers -- on their own secure networks -- by installing a Frontier Enterprise Server.
  • Frontier makes it easy to capture the computational capacity of your existing IT infrastructure, and leverage those resources to run your own HPC applications internally.
  • Also, a Frontier Enterprise Server allows for unlimited usage of an organization's compute engines, making it well suited for very long-running applications - for example, those lasting for months at a time.

Frontier Grid Server provides a variety of Frontier Grid Services that facilitate the creation of application "mashups" with other web services.

• The Frontier Dashboard provides one example of how these grid services can be used. Available from within any Frontier account, the Frontier Dashboard is an easy-to-use web-based interface for launching and monitoring Frontier jobs.
  • The Dashboard features a directory of ready-to-run applications. This directory will continue to grow as more and more software engineers develop new Frontier-enabled applications.
  • In addition, this "publication" model provides revenue opportunities for application designers: software developers can write programs which other users can license and execute on the Parabon Computation Grid.
• Another example of how grid services can be used in a "mashup" is the Parabon Watchman^TM sensor placement application, which combines 3D terrain data with Google Maps to produce the optimal location of a set of line-of-sight sensors.

Also, developers wishing to create their own custom grid applications have a number of tools at their disposal:

• The Frontier Eclipse (IDE) Plugin makes it easy to develop, debug, and deploy your own Frontier applications.
  • Software engineers who are comfortable with the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) will feel right at home creating custom applications using our full-featured Frontier plugin.
  • Not only do we provide comprehensive API documentation, but we provide tools which enable developers to launch their jobs, and monitor/debug them in real time, both on a Frontier Grid or within a locally executable Frontier grid simulator.
• The Frontier Software Development Kit (SDK) enables software engineers to create their own grid-based standalone applications.
  • Developers wishing to integrate the Frontier Grid Platform into their own products directly can download the SDK for free.
  • The SDK includes sample grid programs, tutorials, and full API documentation, as well as the libraries and Java "jar" files which implement those APIs.
• Finally, Frontier Rapids^TM is an integration and execution environment (IEE) for rapidly deploying existing applications across Frontier.
  • Users simply drop their binary or jar file into a Rapids Runtime directory, customize a Rapids Configuration File and experience the power of Frontier faster than they imagined possible. Many existing applications can run on Rapids with no code changes!
  • Also, its job management commands provide applications with the range of control over Frontier that users expect from a fully integrated Frontier application.

By integrating these various pieces, Parabon has developed a comprehensive grid platform, capable of supporting non-technical end-users, as well as seasoned application developers. The Frontier Grid Platform is a revolutionary grid solution that is transforming the very nature of High-Performance Computing.