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:

• Release notes: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.2/4.2.0/rn/release_notes.html
• Software: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/4.2.0/
• Documentation: http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.2/4.2.0/

Thanks for your support of Globus software!

Charles

New Features!

• Persistent HTTP/S connection support in Java WS Core
• Dynamic deployment support in Java WS Core
• JBOSS 4.0.x support in Java WS Core
• An implementation of WS-ServiceGroup added to C WS Core
• C command-line tools for WSRF operations
• Support for GetResourceProperties and QueryResourceProperties in the

Delegation Service

• Added support for the OGSA-AuthZ Authorization Service to CAS
• Server-side attribute-based authorization framework enhancements
• Support for a pluggable Policy Decision Point (PDP) designed to minimize

common authorization errors

• Enhanced security descriptor framework
• A Web service interface for the Replica Location Service (RLS)
• Improved support for multiple TriggerRules in the Trigger Service
• Improved configuration interface for the Trigger Service
• Java API to assist in creating resource properties from external

information sources

• A new resource manager (RM) adapter API in GRAM4

Also see Ian Foster’s blog entry

rPath Enables Cloud Computing for DoE, CERN

RALEIGH, N.C., June 4 — rPath, whose unique technology simplifies application distribution and management through virtual appliances, today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have been using rBuilder to deliver virtual appliances to both scientists’ desktops and computational clouds. The use of rBuilder in these environments reduces the effort required to support users and allows researchers to take advantage of underutilized computational resources.

rBuilder is the first and only product that simplifies and automates the creation of virtual appliances. A virtual appliance is an application with a streamlined operating system, offered in a format that runs in virtualized environments.

CERN turned to virtual appliances to facilitate the analysis of data created by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. The complete software environment needed by the LHC applications is assembled by rBuilder and distributed to run as a virtual machine on physicists’ desktops. Virtual appliances provide a consistent application environment for the LHC applications while, at the same time, allowing scientists to use their desktops for analysis, regardless of operating system.

“The coupling between the LHC applications and the operating system is very strong,” stated Predrag Buncic, virtualization R&D project leader. “By distributing these applications as virtual appliances, we are able to isolate the application from the underlying desktop or laptop operating system, allowing the researchers to run the applications on systems that normally would not be supported.”

The DOE is exploring the concept of using virtual appliances to provide customized environments for scientific applications. Scientific applications are turned into virtual appliances using rPath’s rBuilder. The “Science Clouds” project (http://workspace.globus.org/clouds) provides resources capable of hosting multiple scientific appliances using the Globus Virtual Workspaces software. Scientists submit their virtual appliances to any available resource, knowing that the application environment is controlled and isolated from the underlying system. By relying on portable appliances, the scientists can leverage the resources of science clouds, and seamlessly move to commercial providers, such as Amazon’s EC2, when additional resources are needed.

“For a proof-of-concept, anybody can just configure a virtual machine image by hand,” said Kate Keahey, a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. “But providing appliance management and maintenance that will scale to many thousands of appliances and that will be truly interoperable between different resource providers requires a new approach.”

About rPath

For application providers that want to accelerate license growth, expand into new markets, and reduce support and development costs, rPath’s platform transforms applications into virtual appliances. A virtual appliance is an application combined with just enough operating system (JeOS) for it to run optimally in any virtualized environment. Virtual appliances eliminate the hassles of installing, configuring and maintaining complex application environments. Only rPath’s technology simplifies application distribution, lowers the customer service costs of maintenance and management, and produces multiple virtual machine formats. The company is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C. For more information, visit www.rpath.com.

—–

Source: rPath

EUCALYPTUS - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems - is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces.

May 14th, 2008: EUCALYPTUS is publically demonstrated at the Open Source Grid and Cluster conference.

May 29th, 2008: Version 1.0 is released as a feature-limited binary-only beta.

http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/

As many of you have probably noticed we have recently been sending announcements about the availability of compute clouds for scientific communities: http://workspace.globus.org/clouds/

In a nutshell, TP 1.3.2 allows you to build your own cloud. The main addition is a new “cloud client” for the workspace service which simplifies (and also hides) much of the workspace functionality to provide an EC2-like set of features. The new client also provides a limited form of “contextualization” (more coming in the next release!). We also provide a step-by-step “cloud guide” that allows you to configure your own cloud.

For a complete set of new features (many more but less significant) look to:
http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3.2/index.html#changelog

We look forward to hearing from you — and if you do decide to configure a cloud and would like help finding users, please do let us know.

Have fun!

The Workspace Team
–

Kate Keahey,
Mathematics & CS Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Computation Institute, University of Chicago

I am happy to announce the availability of a science cloud (codenamed “Stratus” ;-) at the University of Florida. This cloud introduces a new feature: the use of virtual networks with virtual machines for cloud computing.

The cloud is available for members of the scientific community: to obtain access you will need to provide a justification (a few sentences explaining your science project) to cloud administrators at UFL. To find out more go to:

http://workspace.globus.org/clouds/

The cloud is currently deployed on a modest allocation of resources as a beta project. We welcome comments, feedback, and bug reports.

Today, it is with great pleasure that the GridShib Project announces the immediate release of GridShib for Globus Toolkit v0.6.0. This release culminates a 20-month effort to bring SAML-based attribute push to X.509-based Grids.

GridShib for Globus Toolkit (GT) is an implementation of a Grid Service Provider, an entity much like a SAML Service Provider but for Grids. A Grid Service Provider consumes X.509-bound SAML tokens, a new type of security token that enables attributed-based authorization in X.509-based Grids.

Most everything you need to know about GridShib for GT is on this web page:

http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-gt-0.6.0/readme.html

On this readme page, you will find more detailed information about the GridShib for GT software as well as links to downloads and documentation.

A major advance in this version of GridShib for GT is support for the TeraGrid Science Gateway use case where an intermediary makes a grid request on behalf of a browser user. The Gateway binds a SAML token to an X.509 proxy certificate and makes a request to a gridshib-enabled web service. On the service side, GridShib for GT consumes the SAML token and makes an access control decision based on the security information in the token.

As a SAML-consuming software component, GridShib for GT complements the previously released GridShib SAML Tools and GridShib Certification Authority (CA), which are SAML-producing software components. These three components together enable attribute-based authorization in X.509-based Grids. See the Quick Start for step-by-step instructions that show how to use GridShib for GT v0.6, GridShib SAML Tools v0.3, and GridShib CA v0.5.1 together on Windows and UNIX systems:

http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib/quick-start.html

For links to all GridShib software downloads and additional documentation, visit the GridShib Downloads page:

http://gridshib.globus.org/download.html

Funding for GridShib software has been provided by the NSF NMI program and the NSF TeraGrid program.

Tom Scavo
For the entire GridShib Team

Several community members have contacted me recently about the Xen-API utilities. I looked into this and discovered a great opportunity for community members looking for a project to contribute to. So, I am announcing a new community effort to complete the development of the Xen-API utilities. If you are interested in working on the Xen-API project please email me at stephen.spector@xen.org and I will call a meeting in mid-May with all people interested to get the project underway.

I’m pleased to announce the availability of Xen versions 3.1.4 and 3.2.1 — bugfix releases in the Xen 3.1 and 3.2 series.

The source repositories are available using mercurial from:

• http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-3.1-testing.hg (tag ‘RELEASE-3.1.4′)
• http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-3.2-testing.hg (tag ‘RELEASE-3.2.1′)

Tarballs are available for download (and will soon be linked from the xen.org web pages):

• http://bits.xensource.com/oss-xen/release/3.1.4/xen-3.1.4.tar.gz
• http://bits.xensource.com/oss-xen/release/3.2.1/xen-3.2.1.tar.gz

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!

Regards,
Keir

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.

This points us to Cloud Control with Distributed Rate Limiting which is a paper about distributed bandwidth management.

From the conclusion:

As cloud-based services transition from marketing vaporware to real, deployed systems, the demands on traditional Web-hosting and Internet service providers are likely to shift dramatically. In particular, current models of resource provisioning and accounting lack the flexibility to effectively support the dynamic composition and rapidly shifting load enabled by the software as a service paradigm. We have identified one key aspect of this problem, namely the need to rate limit network traffc in a distributed fashion, and provided two novel algorithms to address this pressing need.

Check out the summary at networkworld but also here is an excerpt from a UCSD post about it:

If half your company’s bandwidth is allocated to your mirror in New York, and it’s the middle of the night there, and your sites in London and Tokyo are slammed, that New York bandwidth is going to waste. UC San Diego computer scientists have designed, implemented, and evaluated a new bandwidth management system for cloud-based applications capable of solving this problem.

The UCSD algorithm enables distributed rate limiters to work together to enforce global bandwidth rate limits, and dynamically shift bandwidth allocations across multiple sites or networks, according to current network demand.”

Here’s a, let’s say… “embellished” example: Gangsta cloud wars could pivot on the traffic-driving power of Google and Microsoft/Yahoo.

When you’re using VMs like Xen (e.g. on EC2), if you design things for it you “should be able to” move without a ton of hassle (research. plan.). The workspace project has been working on portability and usability (see The first one-click STAR production cluster) and one of the things we can do now is use the same VM image on a regular cluster (such as on the Teraport cloud) and EC2. The contextualization software can be configured to sense if it is on EC2 or not (and will bootstrap accordingly). It “would be nice” if such things were standardized but this is not a real problem right now (IMHO).

About something more “strongly typed” like Google’s AppEngine. Application migration might be a bit harder, but not if the APIs are well known and repeatable. Google’s SDK is even Apache 2 licensed.

To that point, have a look at Announcing AppDrop.com (host Google App Engine projects on EC2). It’s not there yet (database is a flat file) but, hey, it was developed in a few days. Cool. Read more at http://appdrop.com.

The long term idea is not that this would solve all your problems magically but that such things are possible, and if there’s a real market for choices, it seems like more work on things of this nature are also inevitable.

I’m no datacenter business expert, but the biggest problem right now seems to be that few people will be able to compete on costs/efficiencies of scale with Google/Amazon/Microsoft/eBay. (<predictions…>) It feels like it would naturally approach the straight web hosting business, though. Let’s say a standard, open source cloud computing infrastructure emerges (such as Apache httpd in the analogy). There will be various levels of players as far as the capital they have and certainly better and worse companies to choose from (including those that differentiate on service etc). But if you’re really sweating the savings an enormous company could provide with such efficiencies vs. a normal size company/datacenter, you’re probably at the point where you could save a whole lot more by buying your own computers.(</predictions…>)

Miscellaneous point about lock-in: something user-facing that ties you to a provider does not seem like a wise idea (e.g. Google’s Users API).

• Ability to create volumes between 1GB and 1TB
• Ability to create any FS on them after the first mount
• Mounted from same availability zone as the EC2 instance
• Snapshots to S3 (awesome)

See Werner Vogels and this RightScale post.

Fifth (and hopefully final!) release candidates are available from the public xen-3.1-testing.hg and xen-3.2-testing.hg trees.

Please give these ones a spin. I hope to roll the releases early next week.

— Keir

[update: http://www.gridvm.org/xen-314-and-321.html]

And unlike Sun’s attempt (which also needed porting of app to a platform instead of the looser requirements of EC2 style), there is an interesting entry incentive:

“It’s free to get started. Every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.”

http://code.google.com/appengine/

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/04/introducing-google-app-engine-our-new.html

http://appgallery.appspot.com/

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine

If you scroll down to the bottom of the latter link, there are slides and PDFs to view.

The mailing list URL in the newsletter is currently broken, this is the right one: http://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/clouds-bof

Anthony Ligouri notes some interesting things @ KVM for the Mainframe.