Application Hosting Environment

The Application Hosting Environment (AHE) provides scientists with application specific services to utilize grid resources in a quick, transparent manner with the scientific objective as the main driver of the activity. The AHE provides resource selection, application launching, workflow execution, provenance and data-recovery.

The AHE is a lightweight hosting environment for running unmodified applications - NAMD, LB3D, LAMMPS, DL_POLY among others, on grid resources like the NGS and TeraGrid. Applications hosted within the AHE can be further composed of multiple executables as in coupled model simulations.

The AHE client is a consumer of the AHE Web services and is designed to be sufficiently light-weight so as to be deployable on PDAs and mobile phones. The AHE is designed to provide the scientist with a simple, consistent and centralised way to control application instances running on distributed grid resources. The AHE client is designed with the assumption that -

1. the client host does not have globus installed
2. the client host is firewalled
3. the client host does not save application state information
4. the client host needs to transfer large files between gsiftp servers in addition to direct data-staging
5. the user is not aware of executable or environment preferences on the particular grid resources
6. the user is insulated from middleware installed on the grid resource

The application services hosted within the AHE are consistent with the WSRF specification and are interoperable with other WSRF aware clients. The AHE uses WSRF::Lite as its middleware. The AHE consumes services provided by another OMII Managed Programme project, GridSAM, which is its interface to backend grid resources.

Read more about AHE or see how AHE has been used on the NGS in our user case study on Membrane Permeation