Webmaster Ioan Raicu: iraicu@cs.uchicago.edu
Last modified: January 11, 2008
Falkon: Applications
The initial idea and motivation behind Falkon emerged in 2005 with an astronomy application (an image stacking/co-adding service, aka AstroPortal) at its core. The application involved an image dataset Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR4/DR5 of 10TB and involved 1000s to 10000s of object retrievals from this dataset, calibrating these objects, and finally stacking them to produce the final output. In order to leverage a large pool of applications to use Falkon transparently, Falkon also coordinated its efforts with the Swift project (a parallel programming system) and created a Falkon Provider to be included with Swift. Applications from many domains (astronomy, medicine, chemistry, and economics) were tested and showed significant performance improvements. This page informally documents our findings, and points readers to relevant web pages, reports, and/or publications.
All the papers below have some application results.
Yong Zhao, Ioan Raicu, Ian Foster, Mihael Hategan, Veronika Nefedova, Mike Wilde. “Realizing Fast, Scalable and Reliable Scientific Computations in Grid Environments”, to appear as a book chapter in Grid Computing Research Progress, ISBN: 978-1-60456-404-4, Nova Publisher 2008.
Ioan Raicu. “Harnessing Grid Resources with Data-Centric Task Farms”, University of Chicago, Computer Science Department, PhD Proposal, December 2007, Chicago, Illinois.
Ioan Raicu, Ian Foster. “Harnessing Grid Resources to Enable the Dynamic Analysis of Large Astronomy Datasets: Year 1 Status and Year 2 Proposal”, NASA GSRP Year 1 Progress Report and Year 2 Proposal, Ames Research Center, NASA, February 2007 -- Award funded 10/1/07 - 9/30/08.
Ioan Raicu, Yong Zhao, Ian Foster, Alex Szalay. “A Data Diffusion Approach to Large Scale Scientific Exploration”, to appear in the Microsoft Research eScience Workshop 2007.
Ioan Raicu, Yong Zhao, Catalin Dumitrescu, Ian Foster, Mike Wilde. “Falkon: a Fast and Light-weight tasK executiON framework”, to appear at IEEE/ACM SuperComputing 2007.
Ioan Raicu, Catalin Dumitrescu, Ian Foster. “Dynamic Resource Provisioning in Grid Environments”, TeraGrid Conference 2007.
Yong Zhao, Mihael Hategan, Ben Clifford, Ian Foster, Gregor von Laszewski, Ioan Raicu, Tiberiu Stef-Praun, Mike Wilde. “Swift: Fast, Reliable, Loosely Coupled Parallel Computation”, IEEE Workshop on Scientific Workflows 2007.
I. Raicu, I. Foster. “Harnessing Grid Resources to Enable the Dynamic Analysis of Large Astronomy Datasets”, NASA GSRP Proposal, Ames Research Center, NASA, February 2006 -- Award funded 10/1/06 - 9/30/07.
Ioan Raicu, Ian Foster, Alex Szalay. “Harnessing Grid Resources to Enable the Dynamic Analysis of Large Astronomy Datasets”, poster presentation, IEEE/ACM SuperComputing 2006.
Ioan Raicu, Ian Foster, Alex Szalay, Gabriela Turcu. “AstroPortal: A Science Gateway for Large-scale Astronomy Data Analysis”, TeraGrid Conference 2006, June 2006.
Other applications:
Montage
fMRI
AstroPortal
Economics