Virtualization and Grid Computing

http://groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing

More about cloud computing…

Here’s a short quote from Billy Marshall (rPath): A Big Switch or a Gradual Shift?

The historical metaphor that Carr effectively uses to demonstrate the likelihood of this pending change is the switch from locally produced electrical power to regionally produced electrical power delivered via a high performing electrical grid infrastructure. In Carr’s metaphor electricity is analogous to applications and the electrical grid is analogous to the Internet. There are clearly some parallels, but I believe the metaphor is flawed because information applications are more analogous to hair dryers, drill presses, and die stamping machines (i.e. applications that consume electricity) as opposed to the electricity itself.

Billy goes on to point out how companies are always going to need specific things from these electricity-consuming objects, hypervisors are more like the power transformers that convert and reliably step down electricity (into standardized, repeatable delivery units), and virtual appliances are more like the hair dryers, drill presses, and die stamping machines:

When applications can reliably plug into a grid to receive “power” in a standardized and repeatable manner, it will be increasingly popular to let someone else deliver the power of the grid while the individual companies focus on the “design of the application” (i.e. the drill press, the chip digester, the ore smelter).

I think it’s a good way to frame things, an expansion I’d offer is that it is not just hypervisors that are this transformation/delivery mechanism, but also all of the other cluster infrastructure needed to make a leasable datacenter. The security, scheduling, efficiency, and enforcement mechanisms/policies that must be in effect. The hypervisor is in all likelihood going to be the most popular core technology, but there’s a lot more to making a safe, solvent, and usefully leasable cluster.

At the edge of the cluster and beyond, there’s also all the technology and lessons of grid computing to draw from. A field where virtualization is a mechanism being incorporated in a larger pre-established context (cf. papers from our group and many others). In the analogy, facets of grid computing perhaps get us into “buying clubs”, “electricity markets”, “consumer protection”, etc. (and how about rolling blackouts).

Now’s your chance to enroll in the sixth International Summer School on Grid Computing, here’s the announcement:

The sixth in the highly successful series of International Summer Schools on Grid Computing will be held at the Hotel Füred Conference and Congress Centre of Balatonfüred, Hungary, from 6th to 18th July 2008.

The School will include lectures, discussions, laboratory sessions, tutorials and group work delivered by leading authorities in the fields of advanced grid technology, applications of e-Science and distributed systems research. Reports from world leaders in deploying and exploiting Grids will complement lectures from research leaders shaping future e-Infrastructure.

Hands-on laboratory exercises will give students experience with widely used Grid middleware. The school will conclude with an integrating practical that will enable students, working in teams, to bring together all they have learnt on an extended exercise that simulates collaborative research using e-Infrastructures. Indeed during the school, participants will meet like-minded students from many parts of the world, working in many disciplines, and form valuable long-term working relationships.

We invite applications from enthusiastic and ambitious researchers who have recently started or are about to start working on Grid projects. Students may come from any country. We expect participants from computer science, computational science and any application discipline. The School will assume that students have diverse backgrounds and build on that diversity. However, in order to fully participate in the practical exercises you should be a confident programmer who will have fulfilled certain prerequisites.

To find further details visit the web site at: http://www.issgc.org

http://www.ogf.org/TLS/index.php

The “Grid Thought Leadership Series” is a new on-line, open forum that gives thought leaders in the Grid and distributed computing space the opportunity to express their ideas, opinions and perspectives regarding a range of evolving hot topics and issues. We welcome all thought leaders in the Grid and distributed computing community to submit articles for this series.

Twenty eight presentations are online from the International Summer School on Grid Computing (ISSGC) ‘07. Quoting from http://www.omii.ac.uk/news/newsdetail.jsp?id=117:

A collection of 28 presentations captured at the ISSGC ‘07 have been made available online for the first time. The topics covered include: the basics of distributed computing, using common middlewares, real applications of grids, grid software engineering, the future of grid computing, and more. This collection provides a fantastic education for students who are interested in using or studying grid computing, and allows students from around the world to hear presentations from the world experts. Speakers include Malcolm Atkinson, Qian Depei, Erwin Laure, Miron Livny, David Snelling, to name just a handful.

All ISSGC ‘07 content is available in the ICEAGE library:

http://library.iceage-eu.org/resolve/resolver.jsp?rft_dat=lib:7977&svc_dat=details

There’s a new Hadoop blog.

This is just a quick note to point out the newest addition to the family of YDN blogs: Hadoop and Distributed Computing at Yahoo!, a blog that’ll focus on the Hadoop open source project and related distributed computing topics.

I haven’t seen or heard anything besides what’s on the Amazon page for Grid Application Systems Design but new grid books are so few and far between I think it’s worth pointing them out. It’s currently only available for pre-order.

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.