ARCHIVED: What is GRAM, and where can I find information about using it on XSEDE?

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

The Grid Resource Allocation and Management (GRAM) interface is a component of the Globus Toolkit that lets you submit, monitor, and manage remote jobs on a diverse set of grid computing resources, such as the digital services provided by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). On XSEDE, GRAM is well suited for experienced users who want to manage jobs on several digital services from a single command line.

GRAM is not a resource manager or job scheduler; it's a set of components that uses a standard message format to communicate with different resource management systems running locally on individual grid computing resources. GRAM is designed to provide reliable credential management, file staging, and monitoring capabilities for jobs submitted to grid computing resources that incorporate diverse execution environments and an assortment of job management systems.

Jobs submitted using GRAM require proxy certificates, which gatekeepers on target systems use to authenticate requesters before passing job requests to the local resource managers. On an XSEDE digital service, initiating a GSI-OpenSSH session using your XSEDE-wide login automatically creates the required proxy certificate. Otherwise (e.g., using SSH key pairs or a local password to authenticate), you must run myproxy-logon to retrieve a certificate proxy from the myproxy.xsede.org server before initiating a GRAM job request targeting an XSEDE digital service.

Additionally, for your code to run on a remote system, it must be compiled for that system's execution environment, which may differ from the environment on the system initiating the GRAM request.

For information to help you understand and use the version supported on XSEDE digital services (5.0.0), see Execution Management: Key Concepts and the GRAM5 User's Guide in the Globus Toolkit 5.0.0 Release Manuals.

For information about using GRAM specifically for job management on XSEDE digital services, see Job management with GRAM5 in the XSEDE User Portal.

This document was developed with support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grants 1053575 and 1548562. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

KM staff: This boiler is for tracking existing KB documents added to the xsede-all domain during the first quarter of the third project year (July 1 to September 30, 2013).