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Figure B-3 World Community Grid: Architecture

The administration team

Of course, this platform cannot be installed, configured, hosted, and maintained

without a team of qualified IT professionals, who will also take the applications

identified by the World Community Grid advisory board and prepare them to run

on the grid.

Products used

In order to complete the design of the World Community Grid, hardware and

software products have to be chosen for each architectural component.

World Community Grid Web Servers

According to the architecture design, these servers are to be the front ends of the

World Community Grid Web site; their purpose is to serve static pages only, and

forward dynamic pages requests to the World Community Grid Application

Servers.

For reasons of costs and maintenance, the selected servers were IBM ^

xSeries, with Linux as the operating system.

Appendix B. World Community Grid 159

As for the Web server software, it seemed a natural choice to go with WebSphere

Application Server; this product may seem inappropriate, since it is to be used

only for serving static pages, but on the other hand, it provides network

deployment and administration features that are a definite value-add, especially

in terms of implementation and hosting of the World Community Grid

infrastructure. Moreover, it would not make much sense to choose different

products for the front-end servers and the back-end servers.

World Community Grid Application Servers

The purpose of these servers is to relieve the front ends of all dynamic content,

including database access and code execution.

For reasons listed above, these servers should be IBM ^ xSeries running

Linux as well.

The WebSphere Application Server is IBM's premier Web application server. It

provides servlet and JSP™ processors, which includes support for JSP

templates. It supports J2EE applications containing Enterprise Java Beans

(EJBs) along with Bean and Container Managed Persistence (BMP/CMP). It also

includes support for Web services through various protocols.

World Community Grid Storage Resources

These servers are to handle all data storage related activity for both the World

Community Grid Web site and the grid-enabled applications.

Since a considerable amount of data is expected, the selected servers to host

both databases were IBM Shark Enterprise Storage Servers running DB2

database software on AIX/pSeries technologies. In addition to their robustness

and proven maturity, they fit perfectly in an all-IBM servers architecture, and can

be easily managed by IBM Managed Storage Services (MSS).

MSS offers flexible and scalable storage networking solutions for midrange

server environments. Storage capacity "on demand," backup/restore, and

management services are available as fee-based services. Hosted storage

resources receive the benefits of Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network

Attached Storage (NAS) technologies as part of an integrated solution.

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World Community Grid platform

These servers are the core of the World Community Grid. In order to make these

servers homogenous with the rest of the infrastructure, they were also specified

as xServers running Linux.

In terms of software, the grid infrastructure product that would be part of the

World Community Grid had to demonstrate sizeable client counts and satisfy as

many of the following criteria as possible:

򐂰 General considerations

– Good level of maturity, especially on open Internet usage

򐂰 Project-related considerations

– Ability to run multiple applications concurrently, depending on the

contributor preferences

– Contributed resource evaluation system included (to keep track of the

points)

– Collaborative features provided (teams)

򐂰 Agent features

– Non-intrusive technology

– Easy installation and configuration of software

– Low disk space, memory, and bandwidth required

– Ability to communicate through a firewall

– Screensaver

– Automatic update of the client software

򐂰 Security issues

– Protection against spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks

– Communication secured by mutual handshake and encryption

After reviewing several products, and because previous collaborations had

turned out to be definite success (in particular, the Smallpox Research Grid

Project), IBM decided to trust the United Devices MP platform. For more

information, please refer to the following Web site:

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/projects_archive.html