Globus Toolkit 4.0.7 now available:
On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new incremental release of GT4 is now available for download. GT4.0.7 is recommended for all users. It was released because of bug 5910, a potential RFT data corruption bug. The bug affected only GT4.0.6, and users of GT4.0.6 can apply the update package from http://www.globus.org/toolkit/advisories.html. New users are encouraged to start with the 4.0.7 release, as other bugs were also fixed as listed in the release notes.
Relevant 4.0.7 links:
Thanks for your support of Globus software!
Cheers,
Charles
If you’re on the workspace-announce list, you will have already seen the “Science Cloud Available at the University of Chicago” email.
Built with the workspace service, we’ve made some nice client enhancements to get to “cloud simplicity” and it’s up and running on 16 nodes and already serving guests. See the the documentation for command samples, the idea is to make it as simple as possible. On the service side, Nimbus uses TP1.3.1 with some very small additions (mostly this differs because of a new authorization plugin). Building cloud computing solutions is the main business of the workspace service.
Have a look!
[UPDATE: using TP1.3.3.1 now which enables one-click clusters]
We are pleased to announce GridShib SAML Tools v0.3.0, the final release in the v0.3.0 development cycle:
http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-saml-tools-0.3.0/readme.html
http://gridshib.globus.org/download.html#saml-tools
The GridShib SAML Tools are a suite of standalone client tools that issue SAML assertions and optionally bind these assertions to X.509 proxy certificates. To try out the software before downloading, visit our online demo:
https://computer.ncsa.uiuc.edu/gst-demo/
The GridShib SAML Tools require only Java 1.4 (or later) and Ant 1.6 (or later). Proxy certificates issued by the SAML Tools are compatible with GridShib for Globus Toolkit v0.6.0 Alpha (or later).
There have been significant changes in this version of the GridShib SAML Tools since the previous release:
http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-saml-tools-0.3.0/CHANGES.txt
Important new features of GridShib SAML Tools v0.3.0 include:
- enhanced command-line interface
- new command-line options for the SAML Assertion Issuer Tool, including the option to output a DER-encoded ASN.1 structure
- new X.509 Binding Tool, to bind arbitrary content to a non-critical extension of an X.509 proxy certificate
- new SAML Security Info Tool, for examining the contents of X.509-bound SAML tokens
- expanded Java API, for producing and consuming SAML assertions and X.509 proxy certificates
- support for the TeraGrid Science Gateway Use Case
This development cycle was largely driven by the TeraGrid Science Gateway Use Case:
http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-saml-tools-0.3.0/teragrid/readme.html
Science Gateways use the SAML Tools to enable auditing, incident response, and access control in Globus-based grids.
To learn more about this and other use cases, visit the “About GridShib” page:
http://gridshib.globus.org/about.html
While the GridShib SAML Tools produce X.509-bound SAML tokens, the complementary software component GridShib for Globus Toolkit consumes them. The latter is scheduled for release later this month or early next. See the roadmap on the GridShib home page for the latest updates.
Tom Scavo
For the GridShib Team
Some cool new features:
On behalf of the workspace team, I am happy to announce the TP 1.3.1 release of the Workspace Service. You can download the new release from: http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html
The main new feature in this release is the implementation of the workspace pilot which provides non-invasive adaptations to batch schedulers (such as PBS) enabling sites to run virtual machines alongside jobs. The details of this approach are described in: http://workspace.globus.org/papers/workspace-pilot-paper-submitted.pdf
In addition, the release also contains the ensemble service that allows clients to create ensembles of heterogeneous virtual machines to be deployed and managed together, improvements to the client, and several bug fixes. The complete changelog can be found at: http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3.1/index.html#changelog
We welcome comments, feedback, and bug reports. Information about the project, software downloads, documentation and instructions on how to join the workspace-user mailing list for support questions can be found at: http://workspace.globus.org
Happy Valentine’s Day!
As you can read there, the main new feature is the pilot infrastructure. The paper Kate refers to in the announcement is a relatively short read and lays out the ideas (and a practical evaluation) in an organized way. But briefy: the pilot is a program the service will submit to a local site resource manager in order to obtain time on the VMM nodes. When not allocated to the workspace service, these nodes will be used for jobs as normal. Those jobs run in normal system accounts in Xen domain 0 with no guest VMs running.
Importantly, the approach leaves the site resource manager in full control of the nodes and requires no modifications to the site resource manager. Save perhaps possible configuration changes you might like to make. For example, you can mark particular nodes as able to accomodate guest VMs: the workspace service supports sending pilot requests to particular LRM queues, or providing a particular node property etc. This allows you to really organize not just when but where VMs can run.
Several extra safeguards have been added to make sure the node is returned from VM hosting mode at the proper time, including support for:
- the workspace service being down or malfunctioning
- LRM preemption (including deliberate LRM job cancellation)
- node reboot/shutdown
Also included is a one-command “kill 9″ facility for administrators as a “worst case scenario” contingency.
So as a buzzword experiment, I want to put in a particular keyword here and see how the search engine hits work out :-). I think you know what it may be…
Cloud computing
Go make a cloud!
And with the workspace pilot, you won’t have to switch over all at once. Take it for a test run and tell us about it on workspace-user.
We’ve got some exciting stuff in the pipeline for the next few months, too (see the last release announcement and the self-configuring 100 node VM cluster news). I am really happy with where the project is going and has been recently.
- Tim
Amazon SQS is a distributed message queue system with a simple, robust API and real infrastructure to back it. And their prices just dropped significantly from a penny per 100 requests to a penny per 10,000:
Dear Amazon SQS Developers,
We wanted to let you know about some changes we are making to Amazon SQS, based on customer feedback and watching the way customers are using the service. One thing we’ve heard consistently is that customers want to be able to use SQS along with our other services (e.g. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3), but need SQS to be less expensive for this to be more feasible. We looked at our architecture and feature set, and found a way to make a few, targeted changes, by deprecating a few infrequently used requests, which allow us to operate the service much more efficiently. Simultaneously, we are introducing a new pricing structure that replaces the previous per-messages-sent charge ($0.10/1,000 messages) with a new per-request fee ($0.01/10,000 requests, including all Amazon SQS operations). The net result is that the new pricing will result in significantly lower charges for most developers being billed for SQS.
I’m hoping we’ll look back in five years and reminisce about how they charged so much for EC2 as well :-) (I do think it’s a good price now unless you are looking to continually use many, many computers).
Globus Toolkit 4.0.6 has been released!
On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new incremental release of GT4 is now available for download. Users who wish to receive the latest bug fixes are encouraged to install this release. The list of bugs fixed by this release is available in the release notes below.
Relevant 4.0.6 links:
This Better Know a VM entry, Virtual Cluster Appliances, gives an overview of VM contextualization technology which is scheduled to be part of the next workspace service release. This is not just relevant to classic grid computing, but any situation where you’d like to automatically launch many virtual machines that work together and want them to securely organize themselves and adapt to the deployment environment. It can even be used for one VM, we’ll look at such cases later.
The GT development team is pleased to make its newest development release available for download. The 4.1.3 release contains early looks at new features destined for GT 4.2. However, this release is not covered by the same level of support and documentation as stable GT releases. and as such is not recommended for production environments. 4.1.3 features the latest versions of the WS-Addressing and WSRF specs.
Note also that the features and public interfaces in this release are not frozen and may change in future 4.1.x releases.
Relevant links:
To download this release, go to the development Download page at
http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/development/
For information on installing this release, go to the 4.1.3 Installation Guide at http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/development/4.1.3/admin/docbook/
Full documentation for this release starts at http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/development/4.1.3/
