Virtualization and Grid Computing

Kate will give a talk today: 10:30-11:00am at the AIST booth. Go check it out!

(In the future, you should be able to find the slides here).

See http://gridshib.globus.org/ for news updates, several new items were just added.

Announce [2007-11-11]
Tom Scavo gives a presentation of a paper entitled A Grid Authorization Model for Science Gateways at the GCE07 Workshop at SC07.

Announce [2007-11-01]
The OASIS membership approves the Metadata Profile for the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) V1.x and the Metadata Extension for SAML V2.0 and V1.x Query Requesters as OASIS Standards. (GridShib implements both of these Standards.)

Announce [2007-10-31]
The OGSA Attribute Exchange Profile Version 1.0 is submitted to the OGF Authz-WG.

Announce [2007-10-12]
A paper by Tom Scavo and Von Welch entitled A Grid Authorization Model for Science Gateways has been accepted by the Grid Computing Environments (GCE) Workshop at SC07.

Announce [2007-10-01]
The GridShib SAML Tools have been integrated into the MAEViz portal.

Announce [2007-09-14]
The GridShib SAML Tools have been integrated into SimpleCred, a component of the SimpleGrid portal framework.

Kate Keahey writes:

On behalf of the workspace team, I am happy to announce the TP 1.3 release of the Workspace Service. You can download the new release from:http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html

This release adds significant new features. First, the workspace service can now start multiple VM instances grafted off of the same VM image in one request; the VM instances can be managed as a group or individually. Second, we added accounting functionality and services allowing users to query accounting information. Last but not least, we added configuration enhancements to make service administration easier, as well as numerous functionality and usability enhancements for the client.

These new features and enhancements necessitated some WSDL changes as well as an addition of a new namespace. The current release has a technology preview status: both interfaces and implementation are likely to change to some extent.

This new 1.3 release provides a baseline for a cycle of releases that aim to break up the service into several replacable components that could be easily and/or independently used. In particular, the next releases will include the following functionality:

• the contextualization service allowing VMs to be adapted at deployment time to the context of a site, an organization, or other VMs
• the workspace pilot which can be used in conjunction with existing batch schedulers (such as e.g. PBS) to run VMs as well as normal jobs on the same cluster

These technologies are currently undergoing alpha testing by selected friendly communities. If you are interested in testing, and don’t mind a little bit of adventure, give us a call.

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/

Groups:

(click on the picture to read more)

Regarding the last entry, Workspace Service TP1.3, release candidate 1, the user and administrator documentation is now ready to go.

Mail sent to workspace-dev earlier:

We are busy preparing TP1.3 documentation and have put release candidate #1 online in the meantime. You can download RC1 here:

http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3/index.html

Currently the changelog, new interface description pages, and plugin description page are prepared (still considered drafts though). However, the new user and administrator guides are not online yet, see the RC1 notes at the link above.

We are only recommending past workspace service installers try out the release candidate.

The changelog contains a summary section at its beginnng, see:

http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3/index.html#changelog

Some of the additions: group deployments, usage tracking modules, configuration changes to make administration easier, client enhancements, and documentation enhancements.

Instead of a single allocation, EC2 announced you can run several different kinds of instances.

See the EC2 home page for details:

$0.10 - Small Instance (Default)

1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform

$0.40 - Large Instance

7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

$0.80 - Extra Large Instance

15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

In many cases it may be more cost effective to still get the small instance but just get a lot of them, this will be interesting for our workspace EC2 adapter and contextualization users (and us!). Once we make the small alterations to accomodate requesting these types, it will be just as easy to get 100 x small instance as 25 x large instance, or whatever combination, because deployment configurations can be coordinated on the fly. What would be best for what situation would have to be examined closely. An extra large instance for the virtual cluster head node(s) or storage/transfer node(s) could be extremely useful for the typical grid-cluster bottlenecks.

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]