If you’re on the workspace-announce list, you will have already seen the “Science Cloud Available at the University of Chicago” email.
Built with the workspace service, we’ve made some nice client enhancements to get to “cloud simplicity” and it’s up and running on 16 nodes and already serving guests. See the the documentation for command samples, the idea is to make it as simple as possible. On the service side, Nimbus uses TP1.3.1 with some very small additions (mostly this differs because of a new authorization plugin). Building cloud computing solutions is the main business of the workspace service.
Have a look!
[UPDATE: using TP1.3.3.1 now which enables one-click clusters]
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
[ANNOUNCE] Xen 3.2.0 released!
(happy new year — I am still recovering)
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/
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.
See Keir’s mail: ANNOUNCE: Xen 3.1.1 released!, this is a bugfix release.
Binaries aren’t up yet.
