All about Grid and Cloud Computing: Discover the limits

Since Ubuntu 9.04 was released officially today, the following Article is interesting. But not to mention you can do similar with Solaris/OpenSolaris.

Some nice videos about Cloud Computing and how it could reduce global warning. This is the point of view from Akamai so not necessary mine. I do not think that they use a proper definition of Cloud Computing.

Also some videos are a little bit to much like a commercial. Anyhow some ideas and facts are nice to read.

http://www.akamai.com/html/misc/ted.html

The OCCI working group is currently heavily discussing stuff on the mailing-list. We are trying to create an API for 'Infrastructure as a Service' based Clouds. So please come join and help out. Many others already have and some interesting work is going on!

Lew Tucker describes the Sun Cloud API:

McKinsey & Co. released a report which they claim to be 'a "hype free" approach starting with the most basic question of what a "cloud" actually is.':

http://uptimeinstitute.org/content/view/353/319

Finally after some time now the Open Cloud Computing Interface working group became official. We will focus on the creation of an API for remote management of 'Infrastructure as a Service' based clouds. 

The latest charter can be found here: http://forge.ogf.org/sf/projects/occi-wg. That is also the link to our working space in the internet. The official webpage is: http://www.occi-wg.org.

So feel free to join, hop on the project and get involved in the creation of one of the first standards in Cloud Computing.

Sun released a nice document describing what Cloud computing is and how you can use it. It's called "A guide to get started with Cloud Computing".

Amazon introduced the new Amazon Elastic MapReduce service. It is based on Hadoop and still in beta, but still worth knowing about. Remember that Cloudera also offers supports for Hadoop ?

Cloudera annouced that they would offer support for Apache Hadoop on their website. Apache Hadoop is inspired by the Google technologies MapReduce and Google Filesystem. Nice detail: Hadoop is named after the stuffed elephant of one of the engineers kid.

Michael Olson is stated as the current CEO of Cloudera. He formly worked for Sleepycat who created Berkeley DB. They where later bought by Oracle. Nevertheless the idea to bring enterprise support to Hadoop sounds nice.

BTW another interesting posting about Sun Grid Engine and Hadoop: http://blogs.sun.com/ravee/entry/creating_hadoop_pe_under_sge

Me, myself and I at the stage answering questions at OGF 25 (Cloud interface API BoF session):

Today was another interesting day @OGF 25. One session hosted by Wolfgang Gentzsch and Martin Antony Walker dealt with the topic: From Grids to Clouds. Interesting ideas and thoughts what the similarities are. Also some nice ideas about which applications would favor HPC, Grid or Cloud based solutions.

My talk in this session was about the RESERVOIR project: http://www.ogf.org/OGF25/materials/1596/20090224_RESERVOIR_overview_tmetsch-v0.1.pdf

Here are some more pictures from OGF. Not the best weather today but still a nice meeting area:

The BoF session which was hosted at OGF was a success. Over 100 people showed up and the interest was great. Overall the session went well and the Idea to create an Interface for Service Providers/Users was accepted. For more details and the slides see: http://ogf.org/gf/event_schedule/index.php?id=1567

Some more pictures from the session (view from the stage) and some pictures from lunch :-)

 Second day of the Open Grid Forum Meeting just started. Currently there are presentations about 'Grid Application Experiences'. After the break at 11am it is time for the Cloud Interface API  BoF session. So more information is going to follow. For now some photos from yesterday evening and this morning.

Today the Open Grid Forum opened it's gates here in Catania, Italy. For now nothing real spectacular has been going on. Some presentations about great software solutions like Gridway or Opennebula. The Keynotes and opening talks have yet to start after lunch. 

The location is quite great (Attached some pictures). seems to be an old industrial area which they reused as a conference and cultural center. A cinema is also integrate. Quite nice...

From now on I do not state this question anymore. It will ask instead: What is not a Cloud? Any sometimes you can get the feeling the answer is nothing :-)