Enabling the use of Phoebus for GridFTP transfers in Airavata

[Saminda Wijeratne <sa...@gmail.com>]

Hi Devs,

Phoebus[1] is a tool designed to increase the speed of long distance
GridFTP file transfers using advanced backbone networks. In Airavata we use
GridFTP as a tool to transfer the data products. This is where I believe
Phoebus can make a significant contribution to speed things up in our
workflow execution.

To use Phoebus following must be done,

   1. Phoebus installed & configured in the source GridFTP server
   2. In the transfer command using GridFTP API, include set Phoebus as the
   XIO drivers to be used

If we are to enable the use of a tool like Phoebus in Airavata all we have
to do is #2 from above provided someone had done #1. This is a simple
change in GFac we need to do. I have setup the framework in GFac to allow
doing such configurations via an interface [2] and the sample
implementation of [2] for Phoebus is at [3].

See how configuration handlers are used in GridFTP class [4]
makeExternalConfigurations(...) function.

I appreciate any sort of feedback/comments.

Thanks,
Saminda

1. http://damsl.cs.indiana.edu/projects/phoebus/
2.
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/airavata/trunk/modules/gfac-core/src/main/java/org/apache/airavata/core/gfac/external/GridConfigurationHandler.java
3.
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/airavata/trunk/modules/gfac-core/src/main/java/org/apache/airavata/core/gfac/phoebus/impl/PhoebusGridConfigurationHandler.java
4.
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/airavata/trunk/modules/gfac-core/src/main/java/org/apache/airavata/core/gfac/external/GridFtp.java