Virtualization and Grid Computing

Cloud Computing and Its Applications

Also see Ian Foster’s blog entry

Interesting #13 here (well, they’re all interesting): 25 radical network research projects you should know about.

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.”

Old news, but here’s an interesting website: Online Home for the TeraGrid Planning Process. In particular, the Position Papers section.

This month’s OGF newsletter has an article about the Cloud Systems BoF.

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

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

This Better Know a VM entry, Virtual Cluster Appliances, gives an overview of VM contextualization technology which is scheduled to be part of the next workspace service release. This is not just relevant to classic grid computing, but any situation where you’d like to automatically launch many virtual machines that work together and want them to securely organize themselves and adapt to the deployment environment. It can even be used for one VM, we’ll look at such cases later.

http://www.utexas.edu/oncampus/2007/11/15/tacc-feature/

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) recently announced its partnership with the World Community Grid. It will assist the project by running World Community Grid software on its employee PCs, installing the client on the new Stampede cluster –helping scientists scale their research for the World Community Grid – and allowing other large TACC clusters to run Grid computations when there are idle processors.
[…]
“We look forward to working with IBM to explore how researchers can most effectively utilize both TACC advanced systems and the World Community Grid to address problems with deep impact to society as well as science.”

Kate will give a talk today: 10:30-11:00am at the AIST booth. Go check it out!

(In the future, you should be able to find the slides here).