How does it work?

The Campus Grid (CGT) server controls compute resources - such as clusters and high-performance computers. Once installed, the CGT server automatically prepares and configures the CGT client software. The pre-configured client software can then be downloaded from the CGT server and installed onto a chosen client machine. The client machine (generally a desktop computer) is used to communicate with the CGT server.

When a user submits a job, it is sent from their CGT client to the CGT server. An AHE (Application Hosting Environment) service running on the CGT server controls how the job will be submitted to the compute resources and how results will be passed back to the user. The submission of the job to a cluster is controlled by a GridSAM Web Service under direct control of AHE.

It is the role of the system administrator to describe how applications running on the compute resources should be wrapped so that they can be understood by the AHE service. The AHE client can then simply submit parameters to the applications via the AHE server. From a user's perspective, this simplifies the job submission process, because the system administrator deals with any configuration/maintenance problems.

CGT optionally supplies a simplified version of the job-submission process, in which the CGT client submits a program and/or parameters directly to GridSAM for processing on the resources. This gives the user more control over the intricacies of GridSAM, but means that the user must learn the more complex GridSAM interface.