The AliEn system

Novák Judit <n_jude@elte.hu>

Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

The purpose of the AliEn system is to implement a subset of Grid features on workstations primarily running Redhat Linux. Users of AliEn can use this collection of loosely connected computers as a single computing resource capable of running batch

jobs that need huge amounts of computing capacity. The jobs are executed in the idle time of the participating servers, so the computers can perform their primary tasks with minimal AliEn-induced overhead. CERN is the center of the development of AliEn, but about two dozen research institutes from all around the world have already added processors to the system. Work on AliEn has only recently started, therefore there is plenty of room for improvement. Source code can be freely downloaded. At the moment there's only a command-line, UNIX shell-like interface for accessing files containing input and output of the processes.

In this paper, we present an overview of the structure of AliEn. We also describe the process of adding a Debian GNU/Linux server to the system.