Parrot

Parrot is a tool for attaching existing programs to remote I/O systems through the filesystem interface. For example, here's how to use Parrot with vi in order to edit a file on a remote file server:

% parrot vi /chirp/server.nd.edu/mydata

Parrot "speaks" a variety of remote I/O services like HTTP, FTP, GridFTP, GFAL, RFIO, and Chirp on behalf of ordinary programs. It works by trapping a program's system calls through the ptrace debugging interface, and replacing them with remote I/O operations as desired. Parrot can be installed and operated by any user without special privileges or kernel changes and can be applied to almost any program without re-writing, re-linking, or re-installing.

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Publications

Efficient Access to Many Small Files in a Filesystem for Grid Computing, Douglas Thain and Chris Moretti, IEEE Conference on Grid Computing, September 2007.

Grid Deployment of Legacy Bioinformatics Applications with Transparent Data Access, Christophe Blanchet, Remi Mollon, Douglas Thain, and Gilbert Deleage, IEEE Conference on Grid Computing, September 2006.

Transparently Distributing CDF Software with Parrot, Douglas Thain, Christopher Moretti, and Igor Sfiligoi, Computing in High Energy Physics, February 2006.

Transparent Access to Grid Resources for User Software, Sander Klous, Jamie Frey, Se-Chang Son, Douglas Thain, Alain Roy, Miron Livny, and Jo van den Brand, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, volume 18, issue 7, pages 787-801, 2006.

Separating Abstractions from Resources in a Tactical Storage System, Douglas Thain, Sander Klous, Justin Wozniak, Paul Brenner, Aaron Striegel, and Jesus Izaguirre, in Proceedings of IEEE/ACM Supercomputing, Nov 2005.

Identity Boxing: A New Technique for Consistent Global Identity, Douglas Thain, In Proceedings of IEEE/ACM Supercomputing, Nov 2005.

Parrot: An Application Environment for Data-Intensive Computing, Douglas Thain and Miron Livny, Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience, Volume 6, Number 3, Pages 9--18, 2005.

Parrot: Transparent User-Level Middleware for Data-Intensive Computing, Douglas Thain and Miron Livny, Workshop on Adaptive Grid Middleware, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 2003.