It’s thrilling to organize things better.
Quoting from the Nimbus features page:
There are currently two supported remote protocol sets:
- WSRF based: protocol implementation in longstanding use by previous workspace services and clients including the cloud-client.
- EC2 based: clients written for EC2 can be used with Nimbus installations. For more information, see What is the EC2 frontend?
These protocols happen to both be Web Services based and both run in the Apache Axis based GT Java container. But neither thing is a necessity:
- There is nothing specific to web services based remote protocols in the workspace service implementation, the messaging system just needs to be able to speak to Java based libraries.
- Workspace service dependencies have nothing to do with what container it is running in, they are more “straight Java” style dependencies like Spring, ehcache, backport-util-concurrent, and JDBC (currently using the embedded Derby database).
See the announcement: new strong internal interfaces and a new remote protocol implementation (compatible with EC2 clients) that can run alongside the WSRF based ones.
Check out the changelog and the new FAQ.
Congratulations everyone!
On behalf of the Globus Toolkit development team I am pleased to announce that a new stable release of the Globus Toolkit is now available. GT4.2.0 contains an upgrade to the web services specifications used by the toolkit as well as new features in all services. New users are encouraged to use the 4.2.0 release. Existing users may wish to evaluate the new software while maintaining their existing installations; due to the specification upgrade, the webservices are incompatible with the 4.0.x series. Details on the spec upgrade are available in the release notes.
Relevant 4.2.0 links:
Thanks for your support of Globus software!
Charles
New Features!
Some cool new features:
On behalf of the workspace team, I am happy to announce the TP 1.3.1 release of the Workspace Service. You can download the new release from: http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html
The main new feature in this release is the implementation of the workspace pilot which provides non-invasive adaptations to batch schedulers (such as PBS) enabling sites to run virtual machines alongside jobs. The details of this approach are described in: http://workspace.globus.org/papers/workspace-pilot-paper-submitted.pdf
In addition, the release also contains the ensemble service that allows clients to create ensembles of heterogeneous virtual machines to be deployed and managed together, improvements to the client, and several bug fixes. The complete changelog can be found at: http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3.1/index.html#changelog
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
Happy Valentine’s Day!
As you can read there, the main new feature is the pilot infrastructure. The paper Kate refers to in the announcement is a relatively short read and lays out the ideas (and a practical evaluation) in an organized way. But briefy: the pilot is a program the service will submit to a local site resource manager in order to obtain time on the VMM nodes. When not allocated to the workspace service, these nodes will be used for jobs as normal. Those jobs run in normal system accounts in Xen domain 0 with no guest VMs running.
Importantly, the approach leaves the site resource manager in full control of the nodes and requires no modifications to the site resource manager. Save perhaps possible configuration changes you might like to make. For example, you can mark particular nodes as able to accomodate guest VMs: the workspace service supports sending pilot requests to particular LRM queues, or providing a particular node property etc. This allows you to really organize not just when but where VMs can run.
Several extra safeguards have been added to make sure the node is returned from VM hosting mode at the proper time, including support for:
- the workspace service being down or malfunctioning
- LRM preemption (including deliberate LRM job cancellation)
- node reboot/shutdown
Also included is a one-command “kill 9″ facility for administrators as a “worst case scenario” contingency.
So as a buzzword experiment, I want to put in a particular keyword here and see how the search engine hits work out :-). I think you know what it may be…
Cloud computing
Go make a cloud!
And with the workspace pilot, you won’t have to switch over all at once. Take it for a test run and tell us about it on workspace-user.
We’ve got some exciting stuff in the pipeline for the next few months, too (see the last release announcement and the self-configuring 100 node VM cluster news). I am really happy with where the project is going and has been recently.
- Tim
Amazon SQS is a distributed message queue system with a simple, robust API and real infrastructure to back it. And their prices just dropped significantly from a penny per 100 requests to a penny per 10,000:
Dear Amazon SQS Developers,
We wanted to let you know about some changes we are making to Amazon SQS, based on customer feedback and watching the way customers are using the service. One thing we’ve heard consistently is that customers want to be able to use SQS along with our other services (e.g. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3), but need SQS to be less expensive for this to be more feasible. We looked at our architecture and feature set, and found a way to make a few, targeted changes, by deprecating a few infrequently used requests, which allow us to operate the service much more efficiently. Simultaneously, we are introducing a new pricing structure that replaces the previous per-messages-sent charge ($0.10/1,000 messages) with a new per-request fee ($0.01/10,000 requests, including all Amazon SQS operations). The net result is that the new pricing will result in significantly lower charges for most developers being billed for SQS.
I’m hoping we’ll look back in five years and reminisce about how they charged so much for EC2 as well :-) (I do think it’s a good price now unless you are looking to continually use many, many computers).
The Apache Synapse team is pleased to announce the project is releasing 1.1 of the Open Source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
Apache Synapse offers a wide range of connectivity, including HTTP/S, JMS, (S)FTP, SOAP, WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-Security. The project has been designed to allow administrators to support advanced functionality such as load-balancing, throttling, and failover without writing code.
The new Apache Synapse 1.1 release includes many enhancements based on feedback from users, including
- Apache VFS based file transport - supports File System, FTP, SFTP, JAR, ZIP, TAR, GZIP, Mime
- Scheduled Task support makes it simple to run repetitive tasks
- XQuery mediator - simplifies XML transformation with the XQuery standard
- POJO Command mediator - allows the creation of message-independent mediation logic
- DB Report and DB Lookup mediators - support message augmentation and database logging
- Cache and Throttle mediators/enhancements - improve performance and manage load on existing services
- Split/Clone/Aggregate mediators - support batch processing of large messages
- Improved logging and tracing support
With asynchronous support for HTTP and HTTPS, Apache Synapse has very high scalability under load, supporting thousands of concurrent connections even with limited threads. Combined with streaming XML support, Apache Synapse has class-leading performance results.
The Apache Synapse code and binaries are available from the website at http://ws.apache.org/synapse
Thanks
The Apache Synapse Team
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/
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