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Official Debian repository for Condor available

Categories: Administration Cloud Computing DRMAA
July 28th, 2010 by Peter

6 years (!) after my initial Debian ITP (see here) and all the hard work on a custom Condor Debian package, they finally made it too:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/debian/

The Condor people are now offering there own Debian repository for the (longer existing) Condor DEB files. This allows you to have a decently updated Debian-based cluster with the latest version available. Great thing. Use it.

If you were using my Condor Debian packages in the past, you should stop that, and do a careful migration. The user names are equal, and the Wisconsin version of the installation scripts seems to be a little bit picky. I recommend to purge my package (for example with apt-get remove –purge condor) and check for any remainings, before you start with the new repository.

The installation is by default working in personal mode, which demands no user interaction during installation. The package looks like a completely new development, which is sad – some people (check the ITP) spend some time on things such as debconf support.

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GPU in the cloud – somehow

Categories: Cloud Computing Software Development
November 4th, 2009 by Peter

HPCwire explains in a recent article how NVIDIA wants to offer access to a remote rendering cluster called ‘RealityServer’. The current description sounds more like a typical remote software offer (’software as a service’, if you prefer), and not like remotely accessible raw GPU cores, as the title suggests. Anyway, worthwhile a look…

http://www.nvidia.com/object/realityserver.html

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Cloud APIs

Categories: Cloud Computing Software Development
October 5th, 2009 by Peter

My home standardization body OGF published the first list of requirements for a Open Cloud Computing Interface. One of the more interesting parts of this spec is the feature matrix for existing cloud APIs to be considered:

  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
  • ElasticHosts
  • Flexiscale
  • GoGrid
  • Sun Cloud API
  • Rackspace Cloud Servers
  • WMware vSphere

Their analysis shows some interesting facts:

  • Amazon does not support persistent computer resources, most others do.
  • Only Amazon has support for ephermal (real local) storage resources, which are huge and performant, but not resilient to hardware faults. Everybody supports virtual persistent storage.
  • Static IPs and firewall features are about to become “cloud mainstream.”
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When the cloud is gone

Categories: Administration Cloud Computing
February 29th, 2008 by Peter

InfoQ had an interesting article on the recent outage of Amazons storage service S3. The article indirectly gives a beginners lecture on fault tolerance metrics, and gives an insight on the true relevance of SLA in practice. We learn again that even with a new term for distributed computing (“cloud”), the problems remain the same:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/02/s3-outage-trust-slas

[Update]

I start to feel a little sneak preview of old people’s wisdom. See here:

There is nothing new about the failures themselves, it is more about the (misplaced) trust on the vendors capabilities for dependability. Dependable systems cost real money – a lot of it. The old rule still counts – you get what you pay for.

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Cloud Computing

Categories: Cloud Computing Research
January 28th, 2008 by Peter

I was recently asked about Cloud Computing, the new shiny star of the business buzzword competition. My favorite articles about the topic are By Ian Foster, The register, Wired and BBC. The cloud checklist is also nice.

Since I spent the last years in the Grid community, Cloud Computing sounds like the first real business model for Grid technology in my ears. In other words: Industry hopefully can stop now to sell every distributed middleware as Grid (“Oracle 10G”).

The over-utilized ’software as a service’ term could now come true for distributed computation and data storage middleware. This kind of software should be no longer installed and maintained by possible users. Instead, they buy the needed capacities from a ‘cloud provider’. This leads more or less automatically to all the nice problems people tackled in Grids for the last years: data management and transfer, error handling in distributed computation, standardized interfaces, and so on … It makes every serious Grid researcher automatically to a Cloud Computing expert ;-)

My favorite examples are Sun and Amazon, which already provide computational and storage resources on-demand. Google seems to concentrate on the programming models. And I bet that IBM will come up (as usual) with the (of course impressive) mainframe technology in this context. So, everybody will find a home in the cloud …

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