Virtualization and Grid Computing

Cool to see the mainstream press (Newsweek) mention Nimbus: Number Crunching Made Easy.

The Nimbus TP2.2 release provides a standalone context broker that can be used across Nimbus and EC2 clouds and continues our work on EC2 compatibility with the introduction of EC2 metadata server. In addition, the release contains new documentation and bug fixes.

See the changelog for all the details.

It was a good feeling to pause for a moment and put a user quotes page together for Nimbus. We’ve worked hard to make Nimbus usable and useful — but the best is yet to come!

Besides the good stuff added to Nimbus, this release also introduces something called the AutoContainer which allows you to set up a Globus Java web services environment, from scratch and with security working, within about a minute (requires Linux/OSX and Java 1.5+).

The main new features provided in this release are tools facilitating the deployment, configuration and management of clouds. We also updated our implementation to match the current Amazon EC2 deployment. In addition, the release contains new documentation and bug fixes.

You can download the new release from:
http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html

The full changelog can be found here:
http://workspace.globus.org/vm/changelog.html#TP2.1

Tom Scavo writes on gridshib-user:

We are pleased to announce GridShib for Globus Toolkit v0.6.1:

http://gridshib.globus.org/downloads/gridshib-gt-0_6_1-src.tar.gz
http://gridshib.globus.org/downloads/gridshib-gt-0_6_1-src.zip

Please visit the GridShib for GT home page for an introduction and links to software and documentation:

http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-gt-0.6.1/

This version of GridShib for GT is primarily a bug fix release. There is one new feature, and that is, a refactoring of the blacklisting framework that now permits the blacklisting of identity attributes (such as e-mail addresses) in addition to IP addresses and SAML name identifiers. See the CHANGES file for a complete list of changes in this version:

http://gridshib.globus.org/docs/gridshib-gt-0.6.1/CHANGES.txt

Along with GridShib SAML Tools v0.5.0, version 0.6.1 of GridShib for GT will be included in a Capability Kit to supplement the Coordinated TeraGrid Software and Services (CTSS) stack. This is the next step in a focused effort to deploy GridShib software at both the science gateways and resource providers throughout the TeraGrid. This work is funded by the NSF TeraGrid Grid Integration Group through a sub-award to NCSA.

Thank you for your continued support of GridShib!

It’s thrilling to organize things better.

Quoting from the Nimbus features page:

There are currently two supported remote protocol sets:

• WSRF based: protocol implementation in longstanding use by previous workspace services and clients including the cloud-client.
• EC2 based: clients written for EC2 can be used with Nimbus installations. For more information, see What is the EC2 frontend?

These protocols happen to both be Web Services based and both run in the Apache Axis based GT Java container. But neither thing is a necessity:

• There is nothing specific to web services based remote protocols in the workspace service implementation, the messaging system just needs to be able to speak to Java based libraries.
• Workspace service dependencies have nothing to do with what container it is running in, they are more “straight Java” style dependencies like Spring, ehcache, backport-util-concurrent, and JDBC (currently using the embedded Derby database).

See the announcement: new strong internal interfaces and a new remote protocol implementation (compatible with EC2 clients) that can run alongside the WSRF based ones.

Check out the changelog and the new FAQ.

Go Ask ALICE, the iSGTW image of the week. (Funny headline, see Go_Ask_Alice).

Check out some screenshots here of Nimbus resources invovled in supporting this experiment. It’s a small part of things as you can see from the scope of the grid but exciting nonetheless. The AliEn based virtual cluster is now “one-click” and can be launched anywhere running a workspace cloud setup.

VWS RSS feed:

• http://workspace.globus.org/rss.xml

A lot of developments with the workspace service and science clouds recently!

The cluster technology lets you bootstrap generic images into new network and security contexts on the fly. We built a sample cluster on top of the technology that lets you create the cluster and be immediately ready to submit jobs to a Torque cluster fronted by GRAM and GridFTP that use a newly created self-signed certificate:

1. cloud-client.sh –run –hours 12 –cluster base-cluster.xml

2. Wait a few minutes, once launched note the head-node hostname

3. scp -r root@HOSTNAME:certs/*  lib/certs/

   (SSH was bootstrapped end to end already)

4. Make sure your grid tools trust this certificate and then submit work

This can be done with nearly anything that can run on a non-virtual cluster. Check out these links for more information:

• http://workspace.globus.org/clouds/clusters.html
• http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.3.3/index.html

Congratulations everyone!

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

I am happy to announce the TP 1.3.2 release — the “cloudkit release” of the Workspace Service. You can download the new release from: http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html

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