Entries in 'tutorial'
Virtual Workspaces Tutorial at Open Source Grid Cluster (May 12-16, 2008)
There will be a Virtual Workspaces tutorial at the Open Source Grid Cluster conference in Oakland, CA. The conference is May 12-16, 2008. The Virtualization and Cloud Computing with Globus session is on Wednesday, May 14th, from 4:30-6:00 pm. We hope to see you there!
Quoting from the summary:
One of the primary obstacles users face in grid computing is that Grids provide access to many diverse resources, their applications often require a very specific, customized environment. This disconnect can lead to resource underutilization, user frustration, and much wasted effort spent on bridging the gap between applications and resources. Virtual Workspaces describe the environment required for the execution of an application that can be dynamically deployed across a variety of resources creating a working and consistent platform for grid applications.
This tutorial will introduce the Globus Toolkit workspace service that implements workspaces as Xen virtual machines and enables authorized grid clients to dynamically deploy them and manage their resources. Further, we will describe and demonstrate the workspace “cloudkit” that provides a user-friendly interface on top of the workspace service allowing authorized users to easily provision and run VMs on the available community clouds. Finally, we will describe how the process of contextualization can be used to provide on-demand functioning clusters and give examples of its use by applications.
Have a look at the Grid Technology Cookbook. I’ve only started skimming the surface but have already found a few things I hadn’t heard of (added to The Grid Index). Cool.
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).
Saturday-Sunday March 24-25, 2007 at The University of Illinois in Chicago, Illinois
The Open Science grid (OSG), the TeraGrid together with the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) and the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago, and the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, present a two-day weekend workshop program in grid computing and its application to scientific data analysis.
Applications are due by March 2nd, act soon if you are interested. It looks like a good, educational weekend delivered by accomplished instructors.
Midwest Grid Workshop 2007 home page
Here is the full announcement:
2007 Midwest Grid Workshop — Call for Participation
Saturday-Sunday March 24-25
The University of Illinois at Chicago.
http://twiki.grid.iu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Education/MidwestGridWorkshop
Dear Students and Colleagues,
We wish to bring to your attention an exciting two-day weekend workshop in large-scale and high-performance grid computing.
This intensive workshop introduces the techniques of grid and distributed computing for science and engineering fields, with hands-on training in the use of national grid computing resources. The workshop introduces essential skills that will be needed by researchers in the natural and applied sciences, engineering, and computer science to conduct and support large-scale computation and data analysis in emerging grid and distributed computing environments.
Workshop participants will work with some of the world’s leading experts in grid computing. The workshop will focus on enabling the use of the national cyberinfrastructure – Open Science Grid and TeraGrid – to perform large-scale computations and data-intensive processing in the your field of research. Participants will learn to use grids of thousands of processors and will be able to continue to use these resources for their research after the workshop.
The workshop will cover:
* Overview of distributed computing concepts and tools
* Wide-area high speed optical networking
* Concepts, tools, and techniques of grid computing
* Discovering and using grid resources
* Grid scheduling and distributed data management
* Web service and grid service concepts
* Distributed data mining
* Techniques for workflow and collaboration
The school will take place at the University of Illinois at Chicago, near downtown Chicago.
Undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, educators and professionals in engineering, computer science, or any scientific, data- or computing-intensive discipline may apply.
Applicants should have at least intermediate programming skills (one to two semesters experience in C/C++, Java, Perl, and/or Python) and hands-on experience with UNIX / Linux in a networked environment.
The deadline for application is March 2, 2006. Applicants will be notified of acceptance by March 9, 2006.
For more information and an application form, please visit the workshop web-site at
http://twiki.grid.iu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Education/MidwestGridWorkshop or via links at http://opensciencegrid.org/education
These are some notes previously hosted on the old gridvm.org website.
This shows how to run GT4 Java core and/or services in a Java debugger, using IntelliJ IDEA as an example.
The technique (remote debugging) can be used with most Java IDE/debugger combinations. This is a bootstrapping walkthrough, good especially for developers who primarily use editors like emacs and vi and want to quickly learn to use a debugger for their Java GT4 services.
Note that setting this up for GT4 is not much different from remote debugging a normal server application.
Assumptions: working GT4 Java core installation with either the installer or the core tgz downloaded. Any platform supported by both GT4 and IntelliJ (Windows, Mac, Unix and Linux variants). This walkthrough depicts a Linux host.
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These are some notes previously hosted on the old gridvm.org website. I wrote it before the GT docs included the GT4 quickstart and the Globus is Modular guide, both of which provide more information on this subject.
Often, you may want to install a subset of the GT4 packages available in the GT4 installer package. The GT Makefile allows you to take a fine grained approach to what gets installed, including the ability to install just the Java core:
$ make wsjava
Installing the core only can be very useful in certain situations, and more so if you have more certificate tools.
Sometimes people will run the above command (”make wsjava”) or download the Java-core-only binary off the GT downloads page (for example if they run Windows) and be surprised to find that there is not support for creating certificates.
Another problem is that the main GT Admin guide assumes you have simply run “make” which gets you those tools (and many components like GridFTP and GRAM), it may be confusing which chapters you can follow. You might assume that since you have Java core only, you can follow the security setup chapters, since Java core supports security.
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