Virtualization and Grid Computing

;-)

Quoting from http://gist.github.com/7263

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# gcalc  / 26aug2008 chneukirchen / public domain
require ‘open-uri’
q = ARGV.join(” “).gsub(/./m) { “%%%02X” % $&[0] }
html = open(”http://www.google.com/search?q=#{q}”).read
puts (html[%r{(.*?)}, 1] || ‘not a calculation’).
gsub(%r{240| }, “”).gsub(”×”, “x”).
gsub(%r{(.*?)}, ‘^\1 ‘) 

(tip via HubbuH)

An interesting project I ran across, it started in 2004.

From http://vcl.ncsu.edu/:

The Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is a remote access service that allows you to reserve a computer with a desired set of applications for yourself, and remotely access it over the Internet.

You can use all your favorite applications such as Matlab, Maple, SAS, Solidworks, and many others. Linux, Solaris and numerous Windows environments are now available to all NC State students and faculty.

Leasing custom environments to “public-ish” users via PXE or similar technology was happening in other places in 2004, but I never saw anything at this scale.

It is clear that some kind of reconfiguration/resetting happens:

What rights do I have on the VCL machine?

On custom Windows and Linux environments you have adminstrative and root level rights. Since the VCL system reloads each expired reservations with a clean environment, there is no threat of any residual data being left on a machine for the next user.

On Linux and Solaris Lab machine environments, you only have user level rights. The same premissions as you would experience at the console of a walk-in lab.

I wonder when they added the VM support mentioned at http://vcl.ncsu.edu/help/general-information/how-it-works:

The management nodes each control a subset of the VCL resources. These can be blades, virtual machines or lab machines. Currently, a set of individual blades or virtual machines can only be managed by a single management node. Typically there are anywhere from 80-120 physical computer nodes (blades) under one management node. Again the physical computer nodes can either be running a bare metal environment or a Virtual Machine hypervisor.

Here are deployment stats captured on Aug 25, 2008:

• Total blades online: 438
• Total blades offline: 87
• Active Reservations: 49

Cool.

I arrived in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria yesterday. Here to give a presentation of the pilot paper at Euro-Par and represent Nimbus on a panel at VHPC.

I was jetlagged, so I tried to read a little bit, learning about some of the deeper corners of the fantastic Spring framework:

Here you can see the northern end of this beautiful city.

I’ve been told several times that they “don’t see Americans too much in this part of the city” so I think I’ve landed in a good spot.

It would be interesting to have a lot of input on this survey if you have some time, it’s only a few questions.

From: Stephen Childs
Subject: Survey on use of virtualization in production grids

Hi all,

Apologies for the slightly off-topic post. I am giving presentations soon on the use of virtualization in production grids and was thinking it might be nice to have some data to present!

I have set up a survey on the usage of virtualization in production grids at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Sukm0sCdun6EAtpi7IXtwA_3d_3d

The survey will remain open until Friday August 29th. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete, and I think the results should be quite interesting for our community. I get the impression virtualization usage has rocketed in the last year, but haven’t seen any figures on uptake to date.

Please feel free to forward this to anyone else who may be interested in responding.

If you have any comments, please feel free to email me.

Stephen
–
Dr. Stephen Childs,
Research Fellow, EGEE Project, phone: +353-1-8961797
Computer Architecture Group, email: Stephen.Childs @ cs.tcd.ie
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland web: http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Stephen.Childs

It’s thrilling to organize things better.

Quoting from the Nimbus features page:

There are currently two supported remote protocol sets:

• WSRF based: protocol implementation in longstanding use by previous workspace services and clients including the cloud-client.
• EC2 based: clients written for EC2 can be used with Nimbus installations. For more information, see What is the EC2 frontend?

These protocols happen to both be Web Services based and both run in the Apache Axis based GT Java container. But neither thing is a necessity:

• There is nothing specific to web services based remote protocols in the workspace service implementation, the messaging system just needs to be able to speak to Java based libraries.
• Workspace service dependencies have nothing to do with what container it is running in, they are more “straight Java” style dependencies like Spring, ehcache, backport-util-concurrent, and JDBC (currently using the embedded Derby database).

See the announcement: new strong internal interfaces and a new remote protocol implementation (compatible with EC2 clients) that can run alongside the WSRF based ones.

Check out the changelog and the new FAQ.

Go Ask ALICE, the iSGTW image of the week. (Funny headline, see Go_Ask_Alice).

Check out some screenshots here of Nimbus resources invovled in supporting this experiment. It’s a small part of things as you can see from the scope of the grid but exciting nonetheless. The AliEn based virtual cluster is now “one-click” and can be launched anywhere running a workspace cloud setup.