Virtual Workspaces

Kate Keahey and Tim Freeman demonstrated the cloud client for starting VMs and auto-configuring clusters for the TeraGrid gateways project.

TP1.3.3.1 replaces TP1.3.3 to get a bugfix pushed out.

See the announcement for details.

The main new feature provided in this release is the ability to deploy "one-click" virtual clusters -- a much awaited release of the contextualization functions allowing users to create self-configurable virtual clusters on the fly. The new feature comes with improvements to the ensemble service and image compression facilities that extend the range of deployment scenarios in which it can be used.

See the changelog for all the details.

See the cloud pages to download the new cloud client #009. A lot of enhancements have been added including support for "one-click" clusters. You need to upgrade to this release in order to continue using the clouds. See its CHANGES.txt file for a list of enhancements.

Kate Keahey and Marlon Pierce presented Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and TeraGrid at TeraGrid 2008.

See the Nimbus pages to download the new cloud client #008. Notable changes include new "--download" option allows you to easily grab a template or result image in your personal directory, new "--delete" option allows you to delete images in your personal directory

We are excited to welcome Artem Harutyunyan and Michael Fenn to the team by way of the Google Summer of Code 2008.

• Michael Fenn - Implementing a KVM backend to the Globus workspace service
• Artem Harutyunyan - Development of dynamic resource trading service for Virtual Workspaces

Thankyou Google, Inc. for your generous support of open source software.

Workspace Service TP1.3.2 has been released, the "cloudkit" release. Support for the new cloud configuration and many smaller enhancements/bug fixes. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.3.2 pages.

See the Nimbus pages to download the new cloud client #007. Notable changes include new "--download" option allows you to easily grab a template or result image in your personal directory, new "--delete" option allows you to delete images in your personal directory

There will be a Virtual Workspaces tutorial at the Open Source Grid Cluster conference in Oakland, CA. The conference is May 12-16, 2008. The Virtualization and Cloud Computing with Globus session is on Wednesday, May 14th, from 4:30-6:00 pm. We hope to see you there!

Quoting from the summary:

One of the primary obstacles users face in grid computing is that Grids provide access to many diverse resources, their applications often require a very specific, customized environment. This disconnect can lead to resource underutilization, user frustration, and much wasted effort spent on bridging the gap between applications and resources. Virtual Workspaces describe the environment required for the execution of an application that can be dynamically deployed across a variety of resources creating a working and consistent platform for grid applications.

This tutorial will introduce the Globus Toolkit workspace service that implements workspaces as Xen virtual machines and enables authorized grid clients to dynamically deploy them and manage their resources. Further, we will describe and demonstrate the workspace "cloudkit" that provides a user-friendly interface on top of the workspace service allowing authorized users to easily provision and run VMs on the available community clouds. Finally, we will describe how the process of contextualization can be used to provide on-demand functioning clusters and give examples of its use by applications.

The Stratus compute cloud at the University of Florida is available, see the announcement and clouds page for more details.

Feature - The new Nimbus: first steps in the clouds

See the Nimbus pages to download the new cloud client #006. One of the notable changes is the new "--save" option that allows you to persist workspace changes back to your personal directory after running. Previous cloud client versions are now wire-incompatible with Nimbus.

The Nimbus compute cloud at the University of Chicago is available, see the announcement and documentation for more details.

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.3.1 has been released, adding non-invasive site scheduler integration, support for coscheduled, heteregenous virtual clusters, and several small enhancements/bug fixes. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.3.1 pages.

Kate Keahey presented Globus Virtual Workspaces - An Update in several booths at SC07 in Reno, NV.

Kate Keahey presented Globus Virtual Workspaces at the HEPiX Fall 2007 forum in St. Louis, MO.

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.3 has been released, adding group support, client usage accounting, enhancements to make configuration easier, and several bug fixes. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.3 pages.

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.

Our collaborators from University of Victoria will present a talk at the CHEP 2007 conference summarizing their experiences using the Virtual Workspace Service to stand up and manage virtual machines.

The STAR community also presented a talk describing the use of our EC2 portal to run STAR applications. The slides are available for download.

Our paper Virtual Workspaces for Scientific Applications and same named poster from the SciDAC 2007 conference are now online.

The HPDC 2007 "Hot Topics" slides are now online: Enabling Cost-Effective Resource Leases with Virtual Machines

Our short paper on enabling cost-effective resource leases was accepted to the Hot Topics session in the HPDC 2007 conference and is now online: Enabling Cost-Effective Resource Leases with Virtual Machines

This paper discusses how virtualization can facilitate short-term leasing of resources, while allowing resource providers to continue support for existing batch workloads and their current job execution software stack. The paper discusses preliminary results obtained so far, and future work in our group on an architecture to support cost-effective resource leasing.

Two new Virtual Workspace Service deployments are online, see the Deployments page. One of them is a gateway service to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), see here for more information on the EC2 integration.

A Scalable Approach To Deploying And Managing Appliances (pdf) was presented at TeraGrid '07 (Madison, WI). Slides from Kate's talk are available: ppt.

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.2.3 has been released, adding multiple partition management, blankspace creation, an HTTP transfer adapter, and improved scheduling criteria. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.2.3 pages.

With the TP1.2.3 release, it is possible to point to VM images from VM appliance marketplaces such as rBuilder and deploy via the Workspace Service in a easy manner.

Our paper about virtual appliance configuration and management was accepted to the TeraGrid 2007 conference and is now online: A Scalable Approach To Deploying And Managing Appliances

This paper examines configuration and security issues that large and heterogeneous deployments of virtual appliances/workspaces will face.

The Workspace Marketplace is online, an outlet for VM images specifically geared towards distributed and high performance computing.

Borja Sotomayor's Masters thesis, A Resource Management Model for VM-Based Virtual Workspaces is accepted and available online.

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.2.2 has been released, adding support for DHCP based networking configuration, unit tests, and changes to the logistics metadata. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.2.2 pages.

Our paper Division of Labor: Tools for Growth and Scalability of Grids (Freeman, T., K. Keahey, I. Foster, A. Rana, B. Sotomayor, F. Wuerthwein) (pdf) was presented at ICSOC 2006 (Chicago, IL). Slides from the talk are available: ppt.

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.2.1 has been released. This is a bugfix only release. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.2.1 pages.

Our paper Overhead Matters: A Model for Virtual Resource Management (Sotomayor, B., K. Keahey, I. Foster) (pdf) was presented at VTDC 06 (held in conjunction with SC06, Tampa, FL).

Slides from the talk are available: pdf.

Kate Keahey spoke on "On-Demand Virtual Workspaces: Quality of Life in the Grid" at the Fifth Meeting of the Spanish Initiative in Grid Middleware (Nov 13-14, 2006).

Slides from the talk are available: ppt.

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.2 has been released. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.2 pages.