Charles Bacon writes on gt-announce:
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. Source is available now, and binaries will arrive in 24h. Users who wish to receive the latest bug fixes are encouraged to install this release. Highlights of 4.0.5 include:
Several bug fixes in all components, listed in the release notes, and some new features in WS-GRAM and MDS. These new features are all off unless turned on in config files, and all new features are backward compatible. For details, please see the release notes, particularly http://www.globus.org/toolkit/releasenotes/4.0.5/index.html#rn-405-changesummaries-info and http://www.globus.org/toolkit/releasenotes/4.0.5/index.html#rn-405-changesummaries-execution
Relevant 4.0.5 links:
See the release notes for details.
It’s been busy lately, attended the first dev.Globus All Hands Meeting and TeraGrid ‘07 right here in Madison.
At TG07, Kate gave a talk which is online. The paper she presented discusses among other things contextualization, the structure and mechanisms by which an appliance/workspace is “told” what it needs in order to adapt to its deployed environment. This is not just adaptation to site specific services but also to other appliances that may be deployed with it such as in a virtual cluster deployment.
Amidst the bustle we implemented a new backend to the Workspace Service, to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). We’ve deployed it to the University of Chicago’s Teraport cluster and will currently pay for usage by selected collaborators.
Besides being somewhat fun to implement (including getting the Globus and Amazon Secure Message stacks on the same wavelength), I think it’s going to be interesting.
Because grid resources are cautiously approaching the pioneering switch to virtualizing resources [1], even in part, it is going to be interesting and educational to see what people will be able to accomplish with workspaces when a large pool of resources is actually available on tap — today.
Because the same deployment protocols can be used for both native and EC2 resources, there are of course capacity overflow use cases. In the right situations, VMs are a good mechanism for providers to dynamically reach more consumers as the need arises.
For a feature list and description, see What is the EC2 backend?
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[1] and some would say inevitable switch, even with the performance costs. Consider also that ‘virtualizing resources’ may mean physical node re-imaging, cf. Virtual Workspaces: Achieving Quality of Service and Quality of Life in the Grid.
Charles Bacon writes on gt-announce:
The GT development team is pleased to make its newest development release available for download. The 4.1.2 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.
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 4.1.2 Installation Guide at http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/development/4.1.2/admin/docbook/
Full documentation for this release starts at http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/development/4.1.2/
Ian Foster gives us a rundown of some of the new features.
I’ll update the relevant parts of the Grid Index soon.
The GridShib project has simultaneously released new versions of the GridShib CA and the GridShib SAML tools.
You can find the latest code and documentation links (including links to demos) here:
http://gridshib.globus.org/download.html
And here are the changelogs:
GridShib CA 0.4.0
GridShib SAML Tools 0.1.4
Kate Keahey writes on workspace-announce:
We are happy to announce the release TP 1.2.3 of the Workspace Service. The new release adds features enabling partition management for VMs scheduled to be deployed: partitions can be mounted on deployment and blank partitions of a required size can be automatically generated. In addition, we added HTTP transfer adapter for staging, improved scheduling criteria, and added a User Quickstart guide.
For a detailed changelog, see the TP 1.2.3 documentation:
http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.2.3/index.html
You can download the new release from:
http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html
Accompanying this release is a lot of documentation work including a new User Quickstart, Features and Roadmaps pages, the Workspace Marketplace, and sitewide updates.
One of the new features, the HTTP transfer adapter, allows for the service to trigger an HTTP GET on a configured image repository node on the cluster. As with any of the staging mechanisms, from there the file can be propagated to one or many hypervisor pool nodes.
The adapter includes configurations that allow for (a) checksum verification and (b) the ability to auto-sense gzip files (which are common for VMs online) and decompress them after the transfer.
In short, this adapter allows a workspace’s staging request to seamlessly include VMs from online VM appliance marketplaces such as rBuilder (which is much more than a repository of VM images if you have not checked that out yet).
The GridShib Project is pleased to announce GridShib for GT v0.5.1, which is now available on the GridShib Downloads page:
http://gridshib.globus.org/download.html#gridshib-gt
For a detailed changelog of what is new in this release, see:
http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-gt-0.5.1/admin-index.html#gridshib-gt-changelog
The major change in this release is support for using VOMS based authorization in conjunction with SAML attribute based authorization (authorization will be based on one or the other). If you are not interested in using VOMS, GridShib for GT will compile and run without needing to install the VOMS authorization library.
