A user-centric execution environment for CineGrid workloads

The abundance and heterogeneity of IT resources available, together with the ability to dynamically scale applications poses significant usability issues to users. Without understanding the performance profile of available resources users are unable to efficiently scale their applications in order to meet performance objectives. High quality media collaborations, like CineGrid, are one example of such diverse environments where users can leverage dynamic infrastructures to move and process large amounts of data. This paper describes our user-centric approach to executing high quality media processing workloads over dynamic infrastructures. Our main contribution is the CGtoolkit environment, an integrated system which aids users cope with the infrastructure complexity and large data sets specific to the digital cinema domain. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.