User deployment of grid toolkits to engineers

Description/Abstract

Recently a full-scale deployment of the Geodise toolboxes has been performed in the Computational Engineering and Design Centre, University of Southampton. This deployment included the following steps: installation of required software components such as Globus, Condor, Oracle, and Webspere Application Server; installation of Geodise tools; configuring available software packages; training researchers via documents and workshops; and administering the whole infrasturcutre. In this paper we present our hands-on experience from deploying hte toolboxes along with the challenges that may arise while Grid-enabling an existing computational cluster of an organisation. A special emphasis will be given to problems and proposed solutions of accessing COndor pools across a NAT firewall using the existing Grid infrastructure.