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

Parrot "speaks" a variety of remote I/O services include HTTP, FTP, GridFTP, iRODS, CVMFS, 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.

Parrot is particularly useful for running batch jobs in large scale distributed systems. It is most widely used to provide access to high energy physics (HEP) software stacks via the global CVMFS filesystem developed at CERN. Because Parrot views every operation on the filesystem, it can make arbitrary changes to an application's namespace. This allows it to function as a sandbox environment, a dependency tracing tool, virtual machine, and more.

(Note that Parrot is very tightly coupled with the OS kernel. and so it is only available on Linux based operating systems.)

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Publications

(Showing papers with tag parrot. See all papers instead.)

Haiyan Meng, Douglas Thain, Alexander Vyushkov, Matthias Wolf, and Anna Woodard, Conducting Reproducible Research with Umbrella: Tracking, Creating, and Preserving Execution Environments, IEEE Conference on e-Science, October, 2016. DOI: 10.1109/eScience.2016.7870889

Haiyan Meng, Matthias Wolf, Peter Ivie, Anna Woodard, Michael Hildreth, Douglas Thain, A Case Study in Preserving a High Energy Physics Application with Parrot, Journal of Physics: Conference Series (CHEP 2015), December, 2015. DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/664/3/032022

Jakob Blomer, Predrag Buncic, Rene Meusel, Gerardo Ganis, Igor Sfiligoi and Douglas Thain, The Evolution of Global Scale Filesystems for Scientific Software Distribution, IEEE/AIP Computing in Science and Engineering, 17(6), pages 61-71, December, 2015. DOI: 10.1109/MCSE.2015.111

Douglas Thain, Peter Ivie, and Haiyan Meng, Techniques for Preserving Scientific Software Executions: Preserve the Mess or Encourage Cleanliness?, 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPres), November, 2015. DOI: 10.7274/R0CZ353M

Haiyan Meng, Rupa Kommineni, Quan Pham, Robert Gardner, Tanu Malik and Douglas Thain, An Invariant Framework for Conducting Reproducible Computational Science, Journal of Computational Science, 9, pages 137-142, July, 2015. DOI: 10.1016/j.jocs.2015.04.012

Haiyan Meng and Douglas Thain, Umbrella: A Portable Environment Creator for Reproducible Computing on Clusters, Clouds, and Grids, Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing (VTDC) at HPDC, June, 2015. DOI: 10.1145/2755979.2755982

Haiyan Meng, Matthias Wolf, Anna Woodard, Peter Ivie, Michael Hildreth, and Douglas Thain, A Case Study in Preserving a High Energy Physics Application, Computing in High Energy Physics, January, 2015.

Dillon Skeehan, Paul Brenner, Ben Tovar, Douglas Thain, Nil Valls, Anna Woodard, Matthew Wolf, Tessa Pearson, Sean Lynch, and Kevin Lannon, Opportunistic High Energy Physics Computing in User Space with Parrot, IEEE Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing (CCGrid), pages 170-175, May, 2014. DOI: 10.1109/CCGrid.2014.34

Patrick Donnelly and Douglas Thain, Fine-Grained Access Control in the Chirp Distributed File System, IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing, May, 2012. DOI: 10.1109/CCGrid.2012.128

Patrick Donnelly, Peter Bui, Douglas Thain, Attaching Cloud Storage to a Campus Grid Using Parrot, Chirp, and Hadoop, IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, pages 488-495, November, 2010. DOI: 10.1109/CloudCom.2010.74

Gabrielle Compostella, Simone Pagan Griso, Donatella Lucchesi, Igor Sfiligoi, and Douglas Thain, CDF Software Distribution on the Grid using Parrot, Computing in High Energy Physics, May, 2009. DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/219/6/062009

Douglas Thain, Christopher Moretti, and Jeffrey Hemmes, Chirp: A Practical Global Filesystem for Cluster and Grid Computing, Journal of Grid Computing, 7(1), pages 51-72, March, 2009. DOI: 10.1007/s10723-008-9100-5

Douglas Thain and Christopher Moretti, Efficient Access to Many Small Files in a Filesystem for Grid Computing, IEEE Grid Computing, pages 243-250, September, 2007. DOI: 10.1109/GRID.2007.4354139

Christophe Blanchet, Remi Mollon, Douglas Thain, and Gilbert Deleage, Grid Deployment of Legacy Bioinformatics Applications with Transparent Data Access, IEEE Grid Computing, pages 120-127, September, 2006. DOI: 10.1109/ICGRID.2006.311006

Sander Klous, Jamie Frey, Se-Chang Son, Douglas Thain, Alain Roy, Miron Livny, and Jo van den Brand, Transparent Access to Grid Resources for User Software, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 18(7), pages 787-801, June, 2006. DOI: 10.1002/cpe.961

Stefano Belforte, Matthew Normal, Subir Sarkar, Ifor Sfiligoi, Douglas Thain, Frank Wuerthwein, Using Condor Glide-Ins and Parrot to Move from Dedicated Resources to the Grid, Lecture Notes in Informatics, 81, pages 285-292, March, 2006.

Douglas Thain, Christopher Moretti, and Igor Sfiligoi, Transparently Distributing CDF Software with Parrot, Computing in High Energy Physics, pages 1-4, February, 2006.

Douglas Thain, Christopher Moretti, Paul Madrid, Phil Snowberger, and Jeff Hemmes, The Consequences of Decentralized Security in a Cooperative Storage System, Workshop on Security in Storage at IEEE FAST, pages 82-94, December, 2005. DOI: 10.1109/SISW.2005.11

Douglas Thain, Sander Klous, Justin Wozniak, Paul Brenner, Aaron Striegel, and Jesus Izaguirre, Separating Abstractions from Resources in a Tactical Storage System, IEEE/ACM Supercomputing, pages 55-67, November, 2005. DOI: 10.1109/SC.2005.64

Douglas Thain, Identity Boxing: A New Technique for Consistent Global Identity, IEEE/ACM Supercomputing, pages 51-61, November, 2005. DOI: 10.1109/SC.2005.34

Douglas Thain and Miron Livny, Parrot: An Application Environment for Data-Intensive Computing, Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience, 6(3), pages 9-18, September, 2005.

Douglas Thain, Poster: Identity Boxing: Secure User-Level Containment for the Grid, IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, pages 299-300, June, 2005. DOI: 10.1109/HPDC.2005.1520984

Douglas Thain and Miron Livny, Parrot: Transparent User-Level Middleware for Data Intensive Computing, Workshop on Adaptive Grid Middleware at PACT, January, 2003.