• Adam Bishop - Multiple Cluster support for Nimbus
• Jan-Philip Gehrcke - Distribution of computing jobs among different clouds

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

Jerome Lauret from BNL will talk about Nimbus in his plenary on Wednesday March 25th and Artem Harutyunian will present a poster on how he integrated CernVM VMs running on the Nimbus cloud at UC into the ALICE testbed.

See here for schedule details.

There are currently two Nimbus related GSoC ideas suggested by mentors, see:

• Integration of cloud resources into a local scheduler

• ClusterBuilder: Distributed Virtual Environments over the Clouds

See the announcement for more information, how to apply, etc.

Kate will be talking about Nimbus at the Virtualization Workshop co-located with OSG All Hands Meeting in Baton Rouge, LA.

At the same workshop, you will hear about how STAR scientists are using Nimbus in the "STAR & Virtualization" talk and Alex Younts will talk about his experiences running the Wispy Cloud at Purdue on TeraGrid resources.

On the Teraport cloud this has been linked into your personal directory, give it a go! You need to download the cluster XML file from the marketplace. If you've never launched a self-configuring virtual cluster before, the best way to learn is from this walkthrough.

On the Teraport cloud this has been linked into your personal directory, give it a go! You need to download the cluster XML file from the marketplace. If you've never launched a self-configuring virtual cluster before, the best way to learn is from this walkthrough.

Kate will be in Silicon Valley on the 11th to discuss Nimbus and many cloud computing topics and trends.

See this page for details. See you there!

Thursday, January 29, 2pm. Feynman Computing Center, Fermilab.

Abstract:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing is emerging as a viable alternative to the acquisition and management of physical resources. But what exactly is cloud computing and to what extent can it be used to meet the needs of scientific applications?

In this talk, I will give an overview of cloud computing and describe Nimbus -- a toolkit that provides an open source, EC2-compatible IaaS implementation as well as tools that enable, for example, the creation of tightly-coupled clusters such as are often used in science.

I will describe how applications drove the development of various Nimbus capabilities and how they use these capabilities today on Amazon EC2 and the Science Clouds. Finally, I will discuss the emerging trends in cloud computing and discuss how they can benefit science.

See the homepage for CFP and other workshop details.

You can download the new release from here:
http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html

The full changelog can be found here:
http://workspace.globus.org/vm/changelog.html#TP2.2

Read more here (includes launch instructions).

Our virtual cluster deployment tools have been used to create production virtual clusters for scientific applications on EC2 as well as the Science Clouds for the past year.

And speaking of Science Clouds and virtual clusters: Mauricio Tsugawa will talk about CloudBLAST and Ewa Deelman will talk about Montage virtual clusters.

Kate Keahey will discuss Nimbus in her talk The Nimbus CloudKit: the best open source EC2 no money can buy on November 19th, from 4:30PM to 5:00PM at the Argonne booth.

See you there!

Update: download the talk here.

You can download the slides here:
http://workspace.globus.org/talks/ScienceClouds-CCA08.ppt

Download and Installation instructions for the Nagios plugins can be found here and for the MDS Aggregator Source here.

They are looking for feedback!

You can download the new release from:
http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html

The full changelog can be found here:
http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP2.1/index.html#changelog

See this screenshot of the incorporation! Nimbus is the 'Cloud' site in Chicago. See this screenshot for a bird's eye view of the whole operation.

See the announcement for details.

See the changelog for all the details.

• 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.

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 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.

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