Virtualization and Grid Computing

I’ve gotten word that queries to the Grid Index aren’t working for Internet Explorer 6. I will look into it as soon as I can. In the meantime, you can use Google’s default interface to the custom search engine.

I updated The Grid Index (about) a lot this weekend, it’s up to over 2000 annotations!

I updated the Globus mini portal with GT 4.1.2, the most recent development release.

I was browsing Grid Acronym Soup the other day and found some new things, it’s a great resource.

The Grid Index (http://www.gridindex.org) is available to use. This is a search engine backed by Google, annotated to only deliver results relevant to grid computing.

There are currently over 1000 (2000) annotations, and more on the way. If you don’t see something relevant being searched, please try the suggestion form.

If you work with Globus technology, there is also a focused search.

Please take a look. If you have any comments other than annotation suggestions, please drop me a line via comment or email (gridvm@gmail.com), thanks!

[[ See About The Grid Index for more explanation and track news and information via this blog category. ]]

Quoting a position announcement, please pass to anyone you know that may be interested:

*** Open Science Grid
*** Coordinator of Education, Outreach and Training

The Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory is seeking an educationally-focused computational scientist to create and lead the education, outreach and training program of OSG – the Open Science Grid. OSG is a $30M collaborative research network with thousands of users in the US and worldwide, supported jointly by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

This is a pedagogically-focused management position with significant responsibility to create and shape innovative and effective programs that enable new users and communities to harness OSG for scientific research.

We seek to develop a collaborative and vibrant education community that enables students, educators and researchers in computational science, engineering and other disciplines to use the vast distributed resources of the Open Science Grid.

The position will be based at The University of Chicago and Argonne, and involve collaboration with grid developers and users both nationally and internationally. All training will be through hands-on laboratory work, involving students of all levels in direct and immediate use of grid technology.

The incumbent will lead the design and development of education and training vehicles that include workshops, online self-paced courses, learner-support communities and mentorship programs. This effort will form a network of contributors throughout the grid community to develop, maintain and present educational courses with hands-on training labs.

An exciting aspect of the role and vision is to develop and conduct outreach programs that involve, support and leverage students, groups and institutions that are under-represented and/or under-resourced in the area of high performance computing.

This is a position where unlimited creativity can be applied to make a vital contribution to critical national priorities in science and education.

Requirements include:

* An MS or PhD in a scientific or engineering discipline is highly desired
* Education and training experience is required
* Programming and scientific computing experience is highly desired
* Experience in project management, budgeting and evaluation is highly desired
* Excellent communication, organization and leadership skills are required.

For more information, please contact:

Michael Wilde
Computation Institute,
University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
wilde@mcs.anl.gov

To apply, go to: http://jobs.uchicago.edu/
Select “Job Opportunities” and search for requisition # 075427.

The University of Chicago is an EEO/AA employer.

Grid.org is a great way to donate cycles for important causes such as cancer and protein function research.

They’ve been an undeniable success. Quoting from the front page: “As of April 2007, Grid.org manages 3,732,696 global devices, with 1,340,913 registered members contributing 210 years of CPU time daily”

Unfortunately, this forum post speaks of an upcoming announcement that Grid.org is ending:

With seven years and five projects under its belt, Grid.org has successfully completed its mission: To evangelize the benefits (and demonstrate the viability and security) of large-scale Internet-based grid computing. Therefore, it is with great pride for all the accomplishments of this pioneering resource, and above all with the utmost gratitude to each of our members around the globe, that we announce Grid.org will be retiring on Friday, April 27, 2007.

Read the rest for more explanation and alternative places to donate.

Saturday-Sunday March 24-25, 2007 at The University of Illinois in Chicago, Illinois

The Open Science grid (OSG), the TeraGrid together with the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) and the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago, and the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, present a two-day weekend workshop program in grid computing and its application to scientific data analysis.

Applications are due by March 2nd, act soon if you are interested. It looks like a good, educational weekend delivered by accomplished instructors.

Midwest Grid Workshop 2007 home page

Here is the full announcement:

2007 Midwest Grid Workshop — Call for Participation

Saturday-Sunday March 24-25
The University of Illinois at Chicago.
http://twiki.grid.iu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Education/MidwestGridWorkshop

Dear Students and Colleagues,

We wish to bring to your attention an exciting two-day weekend workshop in large-scale and high-performance grid computing.

This intensive workshop introduces the techniques of grid and distributed computing for science and engineering fields, with hands-on training in the use of national grid computing resources. The workshop introduces essential skills that will be needed by researchers in the natural and applied sciences, engineering, and computer science to conduct and support large-scale computation and data analysis in emerging grid and distributed computing environments.

Workshop participants will work with some of the world’s leading experts in grid computing. The workshop will focus on enabling the use of the national cyberinfrastructure – Open Science Grid and TeraGrid – to perform large-scale computations and data-intensive processing in the your field of research. Participants will learn to use grids of thousands of processors and will be able to continue to use these resources for their research after the workshop.

The workshop will cover:

* Overview of distributed computing concepts and tools
* Wide-area high speed optical networking
* Concepts, tools, and techniques of grid computing
* Discovering and using grid resources
* Grid scheduling and distributed data management
* Web service and grid service concepts
* Distributed data mining
* Techniques for workflow and collaboration

The school will take place at the University of Illinois at Chicago, near downtown Chicago.

Undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, educators and professionals in engineering, computer science, or any scientific, data- or computing-intensive discipline may apply.

Applicants should have at least intermediate programming skills (one to two semesters experience in C/C++, Java, Perl, and/or Python) and hands-on experience with UNIX / Linux in a networked environment.

The deadline for application is March 2, 2006. Applicants will be notified of acceptance by March 9, 2006.

For more information and an application form, please visit the workshop web-site at
http://twiki.grid.iu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Education/MidwestGridWorkshop or via links at http://opensciencegrid.org/education

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Science created the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge to celebrate that grand tradition—and to encourage its continued growth. In a world where science literacy is dismayingly rare, illustrations provide the most immediate and influential connection between scientists and other citizens, and the best hope for nurturing popular interest. Indeed, they are now a necessity for public understanding of research developments: In an increasingly graphics-oriented culture, where people acquire the majority of their news from TV and the World Wide Web, a story without a vivid and intriguing image is often no story at all.
[…]
Judges appointed by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science will select winners in each of five categories: photographs, illustrations, informational graphics, interactive media and non-interactive media. The winners will be published in a special section of the September 28, 2007 issue of the journal Science and Science Online and on the NSF website. One of the winners’ entry will be on the front cover of Science. In addition, each finalist will receive a free one-years’ print and on-line subscription to the journal Science and a certificate of appreciation.

• Introduction
• Synopsis
• 2006 winners

Entries must be postmarked by May 31, 2007.

The 13th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS’2007)

• December 5 - 7, 2007
• National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
• Workshop Proposal Due: March 2, 2007
• Paper Submission Due: May 20 , 2007
• Author Notification: August 3, 2007
• Final Manuscript Due: September 2, 2007
• http://www.ccrc.nthu.edu.tw/icpads2007

This 70 page PDF Implementing Persistent Identifiers is a nice overview of identifier schemes.

Chapter 4 is about The Handle System which has been integrated with Globus and is also now a dev.globus incubator project. It provides a powerful set of secure identifier/metadata resolution and administration tools for grids.

The report’s concluding chapter makes no specific implementation recommendation, one of the main reason’s being that “none of these systems ensure persistence: persistence can only be achieved by administrative commitment.”