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
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):
Tom Scavo announces some great news:
Today, it is with great pleasure that the GridShib Project announces the immediate release of GridShib for Globus Toolkit v0.6.0. This release culminates a 20-month effort to bring SAML-based attribute push to X.509-based Grids.
GridShib for Globus Toolkit (GT) is an implementation of a Grid Service Provider, an entity much like a SAML Service Provider but for Grids. A Grid Service Provider consumes X.509-bound SAML tokens, a new type of security token that enables attributed-based authorization in X.509-based Grids.
Most everything you need to know about GridShib for GT is on this web page:
http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-gt-0.6.0/readme.html
On this readme page, you will find more detailed information about the GridShib for GT software as well as links to downloads and documentation.
A major advance in this version of GridShib for GT is support for the TeraGrid Science Gateway use case where an intermediary makes a grid request on behalf of a browser user. The Gateway binds a SAML token to an X.509 proxy certificate and makes a request to a gridshib-enabled web service. On the service side, GridShib for GT consumes the SAML token and makes an access control decision based on the security information in the token.
As a SAML-consuming software component, GridShib for GT complements the previously released GridShib SAML Tools and GridShib Certification Authority (CA), which are SAML-producing software components. These three components together enable attribute-based authorization in X.509-based Grids. See the Quick Start for step-by-step instructions that show how to use GridShib for GT v0.6, GridShib SAML Tools v0.3, and GridShib CA v0.5.1 together on Windows and UNIX systems:
http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib/quick-start.html
For links to all GridShib software downloads and additional documentation, visit the GridShib Downloads page:
http://gridshib.globus.org/download.html
Funding for GridShib software has been provided by the NSF NMI program and the NSF TeraGrid program.
Tom Scavo
For the entire GridShib Team
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.
Interesting #13 here (well, they’re all interesting): 25 radical network research projects you should know about.
This points us to Cloud Control with Distributed Rate Limiting which is a paper about distributed bandwidth management.
From the conclusion:
As cloud-based services transition from marketing vaporware to real, deployed systems, the demands on traditional Web-hosting and Internet service providers are likely to shift dramatically. In particular, current models of resource provisioning and accounting lack the flexibility to effectively support the dynamic composition and rapidly shifting load enabled by the software as a service paradigm. We have identified one key aspect of this problem, namely the need to rate limit network traffc in a distributed fashion, and provided two novel algorithms to address this pressing need.
Check out the summary at networkworld but also here is an excerpt from a UCSD post about it:
If half your company’s bandwidth is allocated to your mirror in New York, and it’s the middle of the night there, and your sites in London and Tokyo are slammed, that New York bandwidth is going to waste. UC San Diego computer scientists have designed, implemented, and evaluated a new bandwidth management system for cloud-based applications capable of solving this problem.
The UCSD algorithm enables distributed rate limiters to work together to enforce global bandwidth rate limits, and dynamically shift bandwidth allocations across multiple sites or networks, according to current network demand.”
