Dear All,

On behalf of the Gridbus Project, I am pleased to inform you that we just
released an updated version of Gridbus broker/scheduler that supports creation
and deployment of applications on both local and global grid resources. A
release notes on Gridbus Broker version 2.2 is included below. The broker comes
with a comprehensive manual: http://www.gridbus.org/broker/2.2/manualv2.2.pdf

The most recent application that made use of Gridbus Broker services is BioGrid,
which supports distributed molecular docking for drug discovery. Please see
section 6. of the following tech report:
http://www.gridbus.org/reports/aus-biogrid-portal.pdf
this provides a walk through of conducting a docking experiment via the portal.
If you want a copy of BioGrid portal, it can be downloaded from from our
broker website. Or if you want to experience the use of BioGrid yourself, please
let me know.

If you want to explore the use of Gridbus services for Grid-enabling your
applications or write your own user-level scheduler that works with our broker,
please feel free to contact us -- we will be happy to assist you in your
endeavor.

Cheers
Raj


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The Gridbus Project to Release Grid Service Broker (2.2 version) Software
22 July 2005
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The Grid Service Broker, developed as part of the Gridbus Project at the
University of Melbourne, Australia mediates access to distributed "autonomous"
resources by (a) discovering suitable data sources for a given analysis
scenario, (b) suitable computational resources, (c) optimally mapping analysis
jobs to resources, (d) deploying and monitoring job execution on selected
resources, (e) accessing data from local or remote data source during job
execution and (f) collating and presenting results. The broker provides (a)
a declarative and dynamic parametric programming model and (b) a rich set of
Java APIs for creating grid applications. It also allows programmers to create a
user-level scheduler plugins that can replace default Computational and Data
Grid scheduling algorithms that support service price-based resource allocation.

The Gridbus broker v2.2 supports/uses the following middleware:
Globus 2.4.x,Globus 3.2,
Alchemi 0.8.0
Unicore 4.1.0
Condor 6.6.9,
OpenPBS 2.3,
NWS 2.8,
SRB(Storage Resource Broker) 3.x,
XGrid Technical Preview 2 & 1.0 (experimental),
SGE (experimental).

What's New:
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- Broker Properties no longer static. This allows the use of multiple instances
of the broker within the same VM. Useful in portal environment.
- Improved support for queues.
- Improved method for handling Node Requirements (only performed after a job has
been allocated to a node).
- Introduced Service Objects which describe RLS, SRB MCAT, NWS and
(potentially), GIIS, GMD
- Added support for new middleware: XGrid & SGE (experimental only)

Download information:
----------------------
The broker source code,binaries, documentation and manual can be
downloaded from http://www.gridbus.org/broker/

Contact Information:
---------------------
For further details about the Gridbus broker and/or the Gridbus project
please contact:
- Dr. Rajkumar Buyya (raj@...) - append @cs.mu.oz.au
- Srikumar Venugopal (srikumar@...)
- Krishna Nadiminti (kna@...)
- Tianchi Ma (tcma@...)
- Hussein Gibbins (hag@...)

Licenses and Disclaimer:
------------------------
The Gridbus broker and the GUI is distributed under the GNU General Public
License (GPL) (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt).
Other libraries included in the distribution are distributed under their
own respective licenses which are also included.

This product includes software developed by and/or derived from the Globus
project (http://www.globus.org/). This product includes dom4j libraries
(http://www.dom4j.org)

Acknowledgment:
----------------
The Gridbus Broker is developed by the Gridbus Project, Grid Computing and
Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Lab., Dept. of Computer Science and Software
Engineering, the University of Melbourne, Australia. The project is
partially supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Project
grant, and the University of Melbourne. We are grateful to, and sincerely thank
all the people who contributed to the Gridbus Broker project. For further
information on the Gridbus Project, please visit - http://www.gridbus.org/
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