Virtualization and Grid Computing

Groups:

(click on the picture to read more)

Regarding the last entry, Workspace Service TP1.3, release candidate 1, the user and administrator documentation is now ready to go.

Mail sent to workspace-dev earlier:

We are busy preparing TP1.3 documentation and have put release candidate #1 online in the meantime. You can download RC1 here:

http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3/index.html

Currently the changelog, new interface description pages, and plugin description page are prepared (still considered drafts though). However, the new user and administrator guides are not online yet, see the RC1 notes at the link above.

We are only recommending past workspace service installers try out the release candidate.

The changelog contains a summary section at its beginnng, see:

http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3/index.html#changelog

Some of the additions: group deployments, usage tracking modules, configuration changes to make administration easier, client enhancements, and documentation enhancements.

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.

I’ve been checking out Axis2 lately, it’s pretty nice. Anyhow, wanted to share this great eye candy that the WS02 GUI has for handler visualization:

(click to enlarge)

This is from Secure, Reliable Web Services with Apache.

Quoting from this press release:

AgileDelta, Inc., the leading provider of software for lightning-fast delivery of more content to more locations, today announced the release of its Axis 1.x and Axis2 Web Services Integration Kits for Efficient XML, the basis for the emerging web standard for binary XML. These simple plug-in integration kits allow the quick and easy addition of Efficient XML into any web service running on Apache’s Axis 1.x or Axis2 engine. The integration kits automatically detect and use Efficient XML for clients that support it and fall back to text XML for clients that do not.

Efficient XML enables applications and web services to encode and decode XML using a cross-platform binary XML format that makes XML data much more compact and transmits that data faster, using less bandwidth and battery life than standard XML. Efficient XML documents can be over 100 times smaller and faster than XML.

Note their performance and features page.

I am still warmed by the approach taken by VTD-XML or TDX (and many others I’m sure): improving XML parsers themselves. Plaintext XML is not going anywhere and these efforts are making progress.

But Efficient XML looks poised to make a big impact, especially with smooth fallback mechanisms for supporting traditional clients.