ACE Computational Registry

ACE computational registry is a light-weighted server on a decentralized network.

On a decentralized computational network, a client agent first contacts the registry for location information about solver services. Upon response from the registry, the client agent takes a second step to contact the solver.

Such a registry knows all the solvers and other application models and software that exist in the whole decentralized system by keeping metadata files. Metadata here means that the registry contains information about the software, but not the software itself. No solvers are actually executed by this registry; instead users directly contact the solvers in a peer-to-peer mode.

The advantages of such a decentralized Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) are significant. The Internet has become popular because it is a decentralized architecture. There is no such thing as a “central repository server” that hosts all the Web pages (or software in our case). Development and maintenance all happen spontaneously.

Major specific features of ACE computational registry include but are not limited to:

• Remote collection of service statistics and job information from potentially unlimited number of computational solver services on a heterogeneous network.
• Automatically finding available computational services for client agents
• On-line and off-line registration of new computational services
• Dynamic update and deletion of registered services
• Easily plugged with ACE scheduler server to provide a mixed centralized and decentralized distributed system
• Intelligently finding computing resources to different jobs
• Checking and managing registry service status and job statistics
• Persistence between registry server starts
• Registry service logging
• Centralized user configuration
• Directory and file cleanup
• Disk, memory and process cleanup
• Critical data backing up
• Keeping track of service utilization and preparing periodic detailed and summary reports
• Automatic input and output validation
• Remote User control
• Support of all major operating systems
• Authentication and authorization
• Security