SDSC Releases Matrix 2.0

released October 07, 2003

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California-San Diego has released version 2.0 of the new Matrix middleware, which allows applications and services based on standards such as the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XQuery, to communicate with data and other resources in Grid environments. More information and the Matrix download are available at http://www.npaci.edu/DICE/SRB/matrix/.

Matrix may be viewed as a "wrapper" or layer on top of the SRB, SDSC's powerful and popular data management middleware tool. Matrix provides coordinated execution of process-flow pipelines in grid environments based on the use of a Data Grid Language (DGL), which functions for data grids like the Structured Query Language (SQL) does for databases. In this way, SDSC Matrix can create and manage process flow pipelines, providing dynamic control of SRB and other services and facilitating scientific computing processes.

Scientific computing requires integrating data from various locations with computing and other resources from different locations into complex workflows. Such distributed grid workflows are subject to uncertainties, dynamic changes in constraints, and failures, and the Data Grid Language allows Matrix to describe these processes as pipelines, giving greater capability to respond to dynamic Grid environments.

For example, a scientific problem may require taking 1,000 files as input data, splitting them into multiple parallel flows, sending them for execution to several different sites, and adjusting the whole process dynamically depending on the results of intermediate steps. Matrix can coordinate data flows from sensors to analysis pipelines, digital libraries, and persistent archives, and will be particularly valuable in large distributed data-intensive environments.

 

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