Virtualization and Grid Computing

A lot of developments with the workspace service and science clouds recently!

The cluster technology lets you bootstrap generic images into new network and security contexts on the fly. We built a sample cluster on top of the technology that lets you create the cluster and be immediately ready to submit jobs to a Torque cluster fronted by GRAM and GridFTP that use a newly created self-signed certificate:

1. cloud-client.sh –run –hours 12 –cluster base-cluster.xml

2. Wait a few minutes, once launched note the head-node hostname

3. scp -r root@HOSTNAME:certs/*  lib/certs/

   (SSH was bootstrapped end to end already)

4. Make sure your grid tools trust this certificate and then submit work

This can be done with nearly anything that can run on a non-virtual cluster. Check out these links for more information:

• http://workspace.globus.org/clouds/clusters.html
• http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3.3/index.html

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.”