Overview

The simplest way of running a job on the OurGrid is by using the public portal of the OurGrid Community. If each task of your bag-of-tasks is a self-contained, non-interactive program that reads input from files and writes output to files, then all you have to do is: i) write a very simple Job Description File (JDF); ii) prepare a "tarball" containing your JDF, the executable of the program ran by the tasks and all input files; iii) upload the tarball via the portal; iv) if you marked the email notification checkbox, wait for an email message notifying the completion of your job; and v) download the results from the job status view.

In order to have more control over your job execution, you can install an OurGrid Broker. By running your application with the support of your own Broker, you will be able to monitor the execution of your tasks, receive the results of the tasks as soon as they are finished, and have access to a number of other useful features.

OurGrid is written in Java, and is open source. So, if you are brave at heart, you might want to use the Java API to write your own application-specific broker to submit tasks to the grid. The OurGrid Broker has been written to allow code reuse as much as possible. Remember that we belong to a community of users and developers; consequently, your problems may be shared by other users. Therefore, do not hesitate to share your ideas and worries with fellow users. Moreover, being a community project, code contributions are fully appreciated.

Finally, have in mind that OurGrid systems are peer-to-peer grids, which implies that, if you want to contribute to the community, you should also install the appropriate software to help you do so. See the Joining the Community Section for details on how to install your OurGrid site. This will allow you to use not only all the resources in your site, but also resources elsewhere; in other words, the more you contribute, the more you earn back.

Mailing List

The OurGrid Users List gathers the people using OurGrid to discuss problems and features, and to share their experiences as well.

Installing an OurGrid Broker

General System Requirements

It is important to know that there will be no need for super-user privileges to install the OurGrid Broker. Indeed, we strongly recommend that you do not run any of the OurGrid components as a super-user.

All OurGrid components require access to an XMPP server in order to work properly. If you do not have this service available, you can either register to use the public XMPP server, provided by the OurGrid Community, or install your own server.

To use the public XMPP provided by the OurGrid community, you can simply leave the default configuration set in OurGrid components. An account will automatically be created  using the username and password provided in the login. We have instructions here on how to install an XMPP server, in case you decide having your own XMPP server (recommended when installing an entire OurGrid site).

Finally, OurGrid components run on both Linux and Windows platforms and require Java 1.6 or some later version of it on all your machines. You can check your Java version with the command "java -version".

Setting up the Environment

The OurGrid middleware requires the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.6 or later installed on your system. You can check the Java version installed on your system by opening a terminal console and running the following command:

java -version

If Java is installed, this command will prompt the Java version.

If the machine does not have Java 1.6 (or later) installed, you must install it manually (it is recommended that you use the Sun JRE distribution available at ). The following table provides the basic installation steps:

To finish installing and configuring a Broker, follow the steps shown here.