Entries in 'osg'

The first one-click STAR production cluster

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]

VDT 1.8.0 released

VDT 1.8.0 has been released.

http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/releases/1.8.0/release.html

Highlights of the new features since 1.6.1:

* Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now supported.

* We are now using Globus 4.0.5. This release incorporates many (but not all) of the patches that we used to apply to Globus. In particular, it incorporates nearly all of the “community branch” (for TeraGrid) changes that we used apply as a set of patches. This change will make it easier to maintain our Globus build. Also, WS-GRAM received a number of fixes to improve reliability and scalability. You can see our patches to Globus. (VDT Ticket 2721)

* Java 5 is now the default instead of Java 4, except for web applications running in Tomcat 5.0. (VDT Ticket 2718)

* VOMS nows runs on 64-bit computers.

* For OSG installations, batch job managers (Condor, PBS, SGE, and LSF) will reset GLOBUS_LOCATION for jobs based on OSG_GRID. This allows GLOBUS_LOCATION to be different for the gatekeeper and the worker nodes. This has been tested on all platforms, but it might not be working on LSF — the current behavior on LSF seems to simply not change GLOBUS_LOCATION, so it is no worse than it used to be.

* There is now an RPM for installing the CA certificates. It has been lightly tested. If you want to use it, it’s best to tell the VDT not to install the CA certificates at all, and then just use the RPM.

* There is now a program, vdt-update-certs, for automatically updating the CA Certificates. It is a cron job that is optionally enabled.

* The way in which web applications are installed into Tomcat 5.0 and 5.5 is now more robust and more consistent with Tomcat best practices.

* Pacman 3.20 is now the minimum supported version of Pacman. It is substantially faster than previous versions of pacman, which makes a VDT install faster.

VDT Team

Open Science Grid Coordinator of Education, Outreach and Training

Quoting a position announcement, please pass to anyone you know that may be interested:

*** Open Science Grid
*** Coordinator of Education, Outreach and Training

The Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory is seeking an educationally-focused computational scientist to create and lead the education, outreach and training program of OSG – the Open Science Grid. OSG is a $30M collaborative research network with thousands of users in the US and worldwide, supported jointly by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

This is a pedagogically-focused management position with significant responsibility to create and shape innovative and effective programs that enable new users and communities to harness OSG for scientific research.

We seek to develop a collaborative and vibrant education community that enables students, educators and researchers in computational science, engineering and other disciplines to use the vast distributed resources of the Open Science Grid.

The position will be based at The University of Chicago and Argonne, and involve collaboration with grid developers and users both nationally and internationally. All training will be through hands-on laboratory work, involving students of all levels in direct and immediate use of grid technology.

The incumbent will lead the design and development of education and training vehicles that include workshops, online self-paced courses, learner-support communities and mentorship programs. This effort will form a network of contributors throughout the grid community to develop, maintain and present educational courses with hands-on training labs.

An exciting aspect of the role and vision is to develop and conduct outreach programs that involve, support and leverage students, groups and institutions that are under-represented and/or under-resourced in the area of high performance computing.

This is a position where unlimited creativity can be applied to make a vital contribution to critical national priorities in science and education.

Requirements include:

* An MS or PhD in a scientific or engineering discipline is highly desired
* Education and training experience is required
* Programming and scientific computing experience is highly desired
* Experience in project management, budgeting and evaluation is highly desired
* Excellent communication, organization and leadership skills are required.

For more information, please contact:

Michael Wilde
Computation Institute,
University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
wilde@mcs.anl.gov

To apply, go to: http://jobs.uchicago.edu/
Select “Job Opportunities” and search for requisition # 075427.

The University of Chicago is an EEO/AA employer.

Virtual Data Toolkit 1.6.0

The Virtual Data Toolkit 1.6.0 was released yesterday. 1.6 is the new stable series and will be used by OSG and TeraGrid.