| Overview |
| Middleware |
| JavaGAT |
| FAQ |
| Adaptors |
| Zorilla |
| Communication Libraries |
| IPL |
| SmartSockets |
| Programming Models |
| Satin |
| MPJ |
| GMI |
| Ibis RMI |
| Applications |
| SAT4Satin |
The Ibis Philosophy
Although grids hold great promise for many scientific applications, writing efficient and portable grid applications is notoriously difficult. Grid programmers often have to use low-level programming interfaces that change frequently, and they have to deal with heterogeneity, connectivity problems, and fault tolerance. Also, managing a running application is complicated, because the execution environment changes dynamically, as resources come and go.
The Ibis project aims to drastically simplify the programming and deployment process of high-performance grid applications. The Ibis philosophy is that grid applications should be developed on a local workstation and simply be launched from there. This write-and-go philosophy requires minimalistic assumptions about the execution environment, and sends most of the environment's software (e.g., libraries) along with the application. The Ibis system is designed to run in a hostile grid environment that is dynamic, heterogeneous, and suffers from connectivity problems.
Subprojects of Ibis
The Ibis project consists of a number of subprojects. All projects are Java, open source (BSD-like license), and downloadable from this website. The Ibis subproject can be used independently, or in combination with one or more other subprojects. Also, all Ibis software can be combined with existing software, including native code.
| Problem | Ibis Sub Project |
|---|---|
| I can't communicate through firewalls and NATs | SmartSockets: Automatically solves connection problems in grids |
| I want to build a (desktop)grid quickly with as little effort as possible | Zorilla: Peer-to-Peer middleware |
| I do not have any money for software | All Ibis software is free |
| My RMI application is slow | Ibis RMI: an efficient RMI re-implementation |
| Writing parallel (grid) applications is difficult | Satin: transparent efficient fault-tolerant divide-and-conquer programming model |
| I want my MPI | MPJ/Ibis: Java MPI Bindings, implemented completely in Java, so platform independent |
| My MPI/PVM Application is not fault-tolerant, portable, does not do streaming, is not multi threaded and not malleable | The IPL offers a grid aware communication library / programming models suitable for writing grid applications and programming models |
| Globus 2, SSH, gLite, Globus 4, all these complicated middlewares are confusing me! | Java Grid Application Toolkit: Simple Middleware independent APIs |
| Any Java models with collective communication? | GMI: Group method invocation |
Evolution of the Ibis subprojects
Below you can view the code swarm video of the ibis project. Basically the dots represent files. The dots get bigger the more commits there are against a file. Authors bounce around surrounded by the files they have edited. Author names and dots are colored based on which portions of the ibis project they refer to:
Ibis code_swarm from Nick Palmer on Vimeo. You can learn more about code_swarm and see the video from other projects here: http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/