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From http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2370981.html
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.
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Source: rPath
From workspace-announce:
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.
There’s been a lot of talk about the dangers of getting locked in to cloud platforms, developing an application that is only suited to one platform.
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).
EC2 announced future support for adding raw, persistent block devices to VMs, a few non-Amazon people are even testing it already.
- 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.
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]
Wow, quoting from Virtualization to aid Intel in saving up to $1.8B through data center consolidation:
- Intel Corp. is reporting today that it is consolidating its 130 data centers worldwide to just 8 global hubs
- 90,000 employees, 137 terabytes of WAN traffic, 93,000 servers in house and supporting those is very, very challenging
- Intel will save between $1.4 and $1.8 billion over 7 years by replacing older technology with new multi-core Xeon processors, along with using techniques such as virtualization
The article points to more details in this video.
Instead of a single allocation, EC2 announced you can run several different kinds of instances.
See the EC2 home page for details:
$0.10 - Small Instance (Default)
1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform
$0.40 - Large Instance
7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
$0.80 - Extra Large Instance
15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
In many cases it may be more cost effective to still get the small instance but just get a lot of them, this will be interesting for our workspace EC2 adapter and contextualization users (and us!). Once we make the small alterations to accomodate requesting these types, it will be just as easy to get 100 x small instance as 25 x large instance, or whatever combination, because deployment configurations can be coordinated on the fly. What would be best for what situation would have to be examined closely. An extra large instance for the virtual cluster head node(s) or storage/transfer node(s) could be extremely useful for the typical grid-cluster bottlenecks.
Quoting from workspace news:
The STAR community successfully completed its first production-size deployment of a VM-based virtual cluster managed by the workspace service and backed by EC2 resources.
The 100 node cluster was composed of a headnode and workernodes based on the OSG 0.6.0 grid middleware stack and Torque. Its deployment-time configuration was securely coordinated by the new workspace contextualization technology.
[UPDATE, related: http://www.gridvm.org/virtual-cluster-appliances.html]
[UPDATE, see: One-click clusters, VWS TP1.3.3]
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