Quoting from workspace news:
The STAR community successfully completed its first production-size deployment of a VM-based virtual cluster managed by the workspace service and backed by EC2 resources.
The 100 node cluster was composed of a headnode and workernodes based on the OSG 0.6.0 grid middleware stack and Torque. Its deployment-time configuration was securely coordinated by the new workspace contextualization technology.
[UPDATE, related: http://www.gridvm.org/virtual-cluster-appliances.html]
[UPDATE, see: One-click clusters, VWS TP1.3.3]
It’s been busy lately, attended the first dev.Globus All Hands Meeting and TeraGrid ‘07 right here in Madison.
At TG07, Kate gave a talk which is online. The paper she presented discusses among other things contextualization, the structure and mechanisms by which an appliance/workspace is “told” what it needs in order to adapt to its deployed environment. This is not just adaptation to site specific services but also to other appliances that may be deployed with it such as in a virtual cluster deployment.
Amidst the bustle we implemented a new backend to the Workspace Service, to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). We’ve deployed it to the University of Chicago’s Teraport cluster and will currently pay for usage by selected collaborators.
Besides being somewhat fun to implement (including getting the Globus and Amazon Secure Message stacks on the same wavelength), I think it’s going to be interesting.
Because grid resources are cautiously approaching the pioneering switch to virtualizing resources [1], even in part, it is going to be interesting and educational to see what people will be able to accomplish with workspaces when a large pool of resources is actually available on tap — today.
Because the same deployment protocols can be used for both native and EC2 resources, there are of course capacity overflow use cases. In the right situations, VMs are a good mechanism for providers to dynamically reach more consumers as the need arises.
For a feature list and description, see What is the EC2 backend?
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[1] and some would say inevitable switch, even with the performance costs. Consider also that ‘virtualizing resources’ may mean physical node re-imaging, cf. Virtual Workspaces: Achieving Quality of Service and Quality of Life in the Grid.
Previously, in S3 re-pricing commentary, I wrote about the good news that Amazon’s EC2 service was hitting capacity limits.
Sun has built it, but will they come? talks about Sun’s lackluster sales with its utility computing effort.
I’m wondering why there is this disparity. In my opinion, there are two major differences between Sun and Amazon’s offerings:
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With Sun’s offering you need to port your program to Solaris.
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Sun’s costs a dollar an hour, Amazon’s costs 10 cents an hour.
I think the porting problem is a much bigger limitation and this bodes well for the workspace concept in grid computing. There is a similar problem with the big grids in that they usually expect scientists to port their code to a homogenous platform — this is sometimes a near-impossible proposition.
Add “On Appliance” to Your “On Premise” and “On Demand” Strategies
I saw this session in person, it was good. I don’t need convincing of the benefits that the software/virtual appliance model brings: I think the benefits exist for many scenarios and they most all stem from the presence of a strict separation of complexity concerns (not a reduction in overall complexity of software). But hearing what the panelists had to say about deployment scenarios and challenges in the commercial software business world was good for me.
I liked the idea of using a VM deployed at a customer’s site to be a sort of customer facing front-end in a SaaS model — a hybrid of over-the-WAN “on-demand” and “on-premise”. This session also moved me to evaluate Zimbra which looks pretty helpful for replacing some mail/collaboration daemons I run (though moving to their clients full time and abandoning Sylpheed/Claws seems unlikely).
Looking to try one of the many virtualization platforms on Linux without altering your install?
virtualization.info draws attention to the latest Knoppix release which includes:
special feature virtualization:
* qemu including accellerated kernel module kqemu,
* kvm for CPUs supporting hardware-accellerated virtualization,
* VirtualBox OSE
* Xen 3.0.4
* VServer
* OpenVZ 2.6.18-028test018.1
In this month’s Globus Consortium Journal is an article by Kate Keahey giving an update on VTDC 06 (she was the PC). She discusses adoption issues, especially current missing links. Highly recommended if you are interested in the intersection between Grid computing and virtualization!
