Virtualization and Grid Computing

Globus Toolkit 4.0.7 now available:

On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new incremental release of GT4 is now available for download. GT4.0.7 is recommended for all users. It was released because of bug 5910, a potential RFT data corruption bug. The bug affected only GT4.0.6, and users of GT4.0.6 can apply the update package from http://www.globus.org/toolkit/advisories.html. New users are encouraged to start with the 4.0.7 release, as other bugs were also fixed as listed in the release notes.

Relevant 4.0.7 links:

• Release notes: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/releasenotes/4.0.7/
• Software: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/4.0.7/
• Documentation: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.0/

Thanks for your support of Globus software!

Cheers,

Charles

Found myself with some rare free time, queuing up some small posts. Here’s a bash function I’ve been using for about a year now to name terminal windows. This is helpful to organize the 10-20 terminals I might have open at any given time across many virtual desktops. Unlike some tricks, I actually use it all the time so I figure that’s one person that finds it useful… so here it is in case someone else might also find it useful.

From .bashrc, it is very simple:

function n() {
  if [ "X" = "X$1" ]; then
    echo "give at least one parameter for window name"
    return 1
  fi

  NAME="$*"
  
  PROMPT_COMMAND=’echo -ne “\033]0;$NAME\007″‘
  export PROMPT_COMMAND
  return 0
}

Here is the ASCII version for copy/paste to avoid unicode issues etc.

Nothing to it… just names the current terminal window.

$ n CLUSTER 3
$ ssh tfreeman@cluster3...

I like CAPS usually and I set my title bar font all big:

This overrides the default setting which was to print the current directory. Here’s how to do that…

PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${PWD/$HOME/~}\007"'

They didn’t have a fixed domain name until recently so I wanted to wait: be sure to add http://blog.xen.org/ to your RSS reader.

“Announcement: All online conference proceedings are now freely available to everyone.”

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/

Now’s your chance to enroll in the sixth International Summer School on Grid Computing, here’s the announcement:

The sixth in the highly successful series of International Summer Schools on Grid Computing will be held at the Hotel Füred Conference and Congress Centre of Balatonfüred, Hungary, from 6th to 18th July 2008.

The School will include lectures, discussions, laboratory sessions, tutorials and group work delivered by leading authorities in the fields of advanced grid technology, applications of e-Science and distributed systems research. Reports from world leaders in deploying and exploiting Grids will complement lectures from research leaders shaping future e-Infrastructure.

Hands-on laboratory exercises will give students experience with widely used Grid middleware. The school will conclude with an integrating practical that will enable students, working in teams, to bring together all they have learnt on an extended exercise that simulates collaborative research using e-Infrastructures. Indeed during the school, participants will meet like-minded students from many parts of the world, working in many disciplines, and form valuable long-term working relationships.

We invite applications from enthusiastic and ambitious researchers who have recently started or are about to start working on Grid projects. Students may come from any country. We expect participants from computer science, computational science and any application discipline. The School will assume that students have diverse backgrounds and build on that diversity. However, in order to fully participate in the practical exercises you should be a confident programmer who will have fulfilled certain prerequisites.

To find further details visit the web site at: http://www.issgc.org

If you’re on the workspace-announce list, you will have already seen the “Science Cloud Available at the University of Chicago” email.

Built with the workspace service, we’ve made some nice client enhancements to get to “cloud simplicity” and it’s up and running on 16 nodes and already serving guests. See the the documentation for command samples, the idea is to make it as simple as possible. On the service side, Nimbus uses TP1.3.1 with some very small additions (mostly this differs because of a new authorization plugin). Building cloud computing solutions is the main business of the workspace service.

Have a look!

[UPDATE: using TP1.3.3.1 now which enables one-click clusters]

We are pleased to announce GridShib SAML Tools v0.3.0, the final release in the v0.3.0 development cycle:

http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-saml-tools-0.3.0/readme.html

http://gridshib.globus.org/download.html#saml-tools

The GridShib SAML Tools are a suite of standalone client tools that issue SAML assertions and optionally bind these assertions to X.509 proxy certificates. To try out the software before downloading, visit our online demo:

https://computer.ncsa.uiuc.edu/gst-demo/

The GridShib SAML Tools require only Java 1.4 (or later) and Ant 1.6 (or later). Proxy certificates issued by the SAML Tools are compatible with GridShib for Globus Toolkit v0.6.0 Alpha (or later).

There have been significant changes in this version of the GridShib SAML Tools since the previous release:

http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-saml-tools-0.3.0/CHANGES.txt

Important new features of GridShib SAML Tools v0.3.0 include:

• enhanced command-line interface
• new command-line options for the SAML Assertion Issuer Tool, including the option to output a DER-encoded ASN.1 structure
• new X.509 Binding Tool, to bind arbitrary content to a non-critical extension of an X.509 proxy certificate
• new SAML Security Info Tool, for examining the contents of X.509-bound SAML tokens
• expanded Java API, for producing and consuming SAML assertions and X.509 proxy certificates
• support for the TeraGrid Science Gateway Use Case

This development cycle was largely driven by the TeraGrid Science Gateway Use Case:

http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-saml-tools-0.3.0/teragrid/readme.html

Science Gateways use the SAML Tools to enable auditing, incident response, and access control in Globus-based grids.

To learn more about this and other use cases, visit the “About GridShib” page:

http://gridshib.globus.org/about.html

While the GridShib SAML Tools produce X.509-bound SAML tokens, the complementary software component GridShib for Globus Toolkit consumes them. The latter is scheduled for release later this month or early next. See the roadmap on the GridShib home page for the latest updates.

Tom Scavo
For the GridShib Team