All about Grid and Cloud Computing: Discover the limits

This is probably the last blog entry which comes live from OGF26. OGF 26 has been great with interesting talks and group meetings. As said OGF wants to take a leadership role in manging the collaborations about Cloud standards. 

The security talks have been interesting as well as sessions about Green IT, SAGA (A Simple API for Grid Applications) and JSDL (Job Submission Description Language). next to that there was a lot of talk about Cloud computing. And thanks to OCCI OGF has a great chance to get some great stuff going on. So stay tuned :-)

Here are some last impressions from OGF:

The Friday Center...

 

Lunch break

 

Prior to the OCCI group meeting

 

Some paper work :-)

 

When was the last time you bought software and got a real CD? Downloads are all around but even more impressing is that Software as a Service (SaaS) is coming. In that case you are not even downloading Software! Amazing isn't it? But there is a downside of it - this article states that costs for SaaS can add up fast. But traditional software seems to get cheaper.

And now take into account that there are also Open Source solutions around...

Sun Grid Engine 6.2. Update 3 Beta has been released. This is a beta version so feel free to try and test it. The Beta closes Wednesday 5/20/2009. The final release will be around June 2009.

The great team of engineers added some nice features to this feature update:

Sun Grid Engine Inspect: SGE Inspect, a new Monitoring and Configuration Console, allows to monitor Sun Grid Engine clusters and to monitor and configure the Service Domain Manager (SDM).

Service Domain Manager (SDM) - Cloud Adapter and Initial Power Saving Support: The new SDM service adapter interface adds support to manage external virtual resources. The implementation provides an interface to manage Amazon's EC2 AMIs. Those AMIs could include SGE execution hosts which can be added to a local Sun Grid Engine cluster. The enhanced spare pool implementation can be configured to power cycle machines when being added or removed from the spare pool.

"Exclusive Job" Scheduling Enhancement: Jobs and all parallel tasks of a job can request exclusive scheduling on a host. Jobs requiring resources only available for one job per host or jobs having access patterns to hardware resources like CPUs or memory, which make it useful to run only one job per machine can request non shared access.

Complete Microsoft Windows Vista Support: A native Windows job can now open a GUI on a Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 desktop (SGE 6.2u2 added support for those Windows operating systems)

More information can be found here:

• Download http://www.sun.com/software/sge/get_it.jsp
• Documentation http://wikis.sun.com/display/gridengine62u3

Support and Feedback:

• Technical support alias: sge-beta AT sun.com
• Feedback on documentation: sge-beta-doc AT sun.com
• General feedback: sge-beta-feedback AT sun.com
  

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.

The OGF homepage released an wrapup of the last event. Seems to be that the Cloud Interface API BoF session I co-chaired was a highlight. Just like the session "from Grid to Clouds" where I presented RESERVOIR. Afterall a great OGF event. The complete wrapup is here.

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:

Okay it's already the 4th day of the OGF. but nevertheless I wanted to blog about day 3. Not much was going on - Some interesting presentations about Cloud computing and GreenIT. Besides that networking was more or less the thing to do. Talk to people, get ideas and share thoughts about Cloud and Grid computing.

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 :-)

The next meeting of the Open Grid Forum is coming up. From March 2nd till 6th we will meet in Catania, Italy. Definitely not the worst place to be. The schedule is already up and some interesting meetings are available. Because of some shameless self promotion I want to point out to:

• Cloud Interface API BoF session
  
• From Grids to Clouds, a workshop for grid users facing the Cloud
• SAGA working group session

I will give presentations, chair groups and on top of that be very happen when I could meet you at OGF 25 :-)

OpenNebula is now part of the Ubuntu Server distribution. Great news, hope to see other products there also in near future. On the development blog of the team is a nice entry about using open nebula on Ubuntu: http://blog.dsa-research.org/?p=130  The title might be a little bit misleading though...

 Also Borja, a former collegaue of mine, got a new version of Haizea announced: http://blog.dsa-research.org/?p=132