Virtualization and Grid Computing

Cloud Computing and Its Applications

Also see Ian Foster’s blog entry

From http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2370981.html

rPath Enables Cloud Computing for DoE, CERN

RALEIGH, N.C., June 4 — rPath, whose unique technology simplifies application distribution and management through virtual appliances, today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have been using rBuilder to deliver virtual appliances to both scientists’ desktops and computational clouds. The use of rBuilder in these environments reduces the effort required to support users and allows researchers to take advantage of underutilized computational resources.

rBuilder is the first and only product that simplifies and automates the creation of virtual appliances. A virtual appliance is an application with a streamlined operating system, offered in a format that runs in virtualized environments.

CERN turned to virtual appliances to facilitate the analysis of data created by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. The complete software environment needed by the LHC applications is assembled by rBuilder and distributed to run as a virtual machine on physicists’ desktops. Virtual appliances provide a consistent application environment for the LHC applications while, at the same time, allowing scientists to use their desktops for analysis, regardless of operating system.

“The coupling between the LHC applications and the operating system is very strong,” stated Predrag Buncic, virtualization R&D project leader. “By distributing these applications as virtual appliances, we are able to isolate the application from the underlying desktop or laptop operating system, allowing the researchers to run the applications on systems that normally would not be supported.”

The DOE is exploring the concept of using virtual appliances to provide customized environments for scientific applications. Scientific applications are turned into virtual appliances using rPath’s rBuilder. The “Science Clouds” project (http://workspace.globus.org/clouds) provides resources capable of hosting multiple scientific appliances using the Globus Virtual Workspaces software. Scientists submit their virtual appliances to any available resource, knowing that the application environment is controlled and isolated from the underlying system. By relying on portable appliances, the scientists can leverage the resources of science clouds, and seamlessly move to commercial providers, such as Amazon’s EC2, when additional resources are needed.

“For a proof-of-concept, anybody can just configure a virtual machine image by hand,” said Kate Keahey, a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. “But providing appliance management and maintenance that will scale to many thousands of appliances and that will be truly interoperable between different resource providers requires a new approach.”

About rPath

For application providers that want to accelerate license growth, expand into new markets, and reduce support and development costs, rPath’s platform transforms applications into virtual appliances. A virtual appliance is an application combined with just enough operating system (JeOS) for it to run optimally in any virtualized environment. Virtual appliances eliminate the hassles of installing, configuring and maintaining complex application environments. Only rPath’s technology simplifies application distribution, lowers the customer service costs of maintenance and management, and produces multiple virtual machine formats. The company is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C. For more information, visit www.rpath.com.

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Source: rPath

EUCALYPTUS - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems - is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces.

May 14th, 2008: EUCALYPTUS is publically demonstrated at the Open Source Grid and Cluster conference.

May 29th, 2008: Version 1.0 is released as a feature-limited binary-only beta.

http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/

I am happy to announce the TP 1.3.2 release — the “cloudkit release” of the Workspace Service. You can download the new release from: http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html

As many of you have probably noticed we have recently been sending announcements about the availability of compute clouds for scientific communities: http://workspace.globus.org/clouds/

In a nutshell, TP 1.3.2 allows you to build your own cloud. The main addition is a new “cloud client” for the workspace service which simplifies (and also hides) much of the workspace functionality to provide an EC2-like set of features. The new client also provides a limited form of “contextualization” (more coming in the next release!). We also provide a step-by-step “cloud guide” that allows you to configure your own cloud.

For a complete set of new features (many more but less significant) look to:
http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3.2/index.html#changelog

We look forward to hearing from you — and if you do decide to configure a cloud and would like help finding users, please do let us know.

Have fun!

The Workspace Team
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Kate Keahey,
Mathematics & CS Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Computation Institute, University of Chicago

From workspace-announce:

I am happy to announce the availability of a science cloud (codenamed “Stratus” ;-) at the University of Florida. This cloud introduces a new feature: the use of virtual networks with virtual machines for cloud computing.

The cloud is available for members of the scientific community: to obtain access you will need to provide a justification (a few sentences explaining your science project) to cloud administrators at UFL. To find out more go to:

http://workspace.globus.org/clouds/

The cloud is currently deployed on a modest allocation of resources as a beta project. We welcome comments, feedback, and bug reports.

If you’re feeling adventurous, there’s a workspace service pre-release out (click on the pic):

http://groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing

Virtual Workspaces Tutorial at Open Source Grid Cluster (May 12-16, 2008)

There will be a Virtual Workspaces tutorial at the Open Source Grid Cluster conference in Oakland, CA. The conference is May 12-16, 2008. The Virtualization and Cloud Computing with Globus session is on Wednesday, May 14th, from 4:30-6:00 pm. We hope to see you there!

Quoting from the summary:

One of the primary obstacles users face in grid computing is that Grids provide access to many diverse resources, their applications often require a very specific, customized environment. This disconnect can lead to resource underutilization, user frustration, and much wasted effort spent on bridging the gap between applications and resources. Virtual Workspaces describe the environment required for the execution of an application that can be dynamically deployed across a variety of resources creating a working and consistent platform for grid applications.

This tutorial will introduce the Globus Toolkit workspace service that implements workspaces as Xen virtual machines and enables authorized grid clients to dynamically deploy them and manage their resources. Further, we will describe and demonstrate the workspace “cloudkit” that provides a user-friendly interface on top of the workspace service allowing authorized users to easily provision and run VMs on the available community clouds. Finally, we will describe how the process of contextualization can be used to provide on-demand functioning clusters and give examples of its use by applications.