Idea

QCG-Now is a general purpose tool, so it may be used by a broad range of users, in a variousity of experiments and allows to execute tasks on many different resources. It supports a number of popular computational applications.

QCG-Now is a free-to-use and open-source program that allows access to the biggest machines in Poland that are offered by PLGrid.

When desigining QCG-Now, we focused on creating a novel solution that is easy to use and intuitive on one hand, but very flexible and powerful on the other. Does this sound too idealistic? For sure, but with the knowledge gained from the development of QCG and previous users’ tools, we were able to define 10 crucial objectives to guide us towards the previously defined goal:

1. The installation of the program should be strightforward and the program itself has to provide a nice, intuitive user interface.
2. The program should allow to efficiently run majority of computing jobs.
3. The program should offer unified access to many computing resources.
4. Submission of a job should be automatized as far as possible.
5. It should be possible to easily create and reuse schemes/templates for submission of typical jobs.
6. It should be possible to use the program from scripts.
7. Data management should be automatic.
8. Authorization procedures should be simple, non-invasive.
9. The jobs and especially their results should be ease to recover in case of failure.
10. Users should be able to get instant support.

We hope that our assumptions are correct and when calculations require larger power than available on a personal machine, QCG-Now will be the best way of moving them to remote resources.