All about Grid and Cloud Computing: Discover the limits

Randy Bias from GoGrid posted this blog entry earlier today:

http://neotactics.com/blog/technology/the-open-cloud-is-coming

Interesting is what he says:

Already there are the inklings of people working on concrete standards including ones for cloud computing infrastructure (Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) a working group of the Open Grid Foundation (OGF)) and the portability of virtual machines (Open Virtualization Format (OVF)). Once these standards are finished and embraced by even a few clouds many customers will opt to choose cloud providers that use them, avoiding vendor lock-in and give choice to customers.

I agree with this statement and hope people will really adopt those standards. Sun is sadly enough not mentioned in the blog-entry. Although not all Cloud Vendors get nice grades .-)

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.

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...

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'm still playing around with the new upcoming release of 2008.11. The system is installed on a X4100 and registered as NIS client with automounter configured. Works great - it was all set up in < 3 hours :-)

This time I tried SMF and vpanels. Vpanels is great for administrative tasks, like configuring apache. SMF is the rocking alternative to old runlevel scripts. Works fine, only to register a new service you have to write a bunch of XML. XML is great to be handled by computers but bad ugly for humans...but nevermind :-) It worked after some tries...

I managed to install the system and register the applications my document management tools needs in SMF. Also added glassfish as SMF service. Everythink works fine now. And thanks to ZFS snapshot I could even roll back (but I don't want) :-)

But for know the server is running, and running, and running...