When my family and I recently moved into our new apartment, it was equipped with a front door with two locks: both of them with a spring latch. To get in, we needed to put a key in each and turn both while somehow turning the door handle at the same time. It could take quite a while … Read the rest
The original purpose of GridPilot was to make it easy for researchers to run, preserve, rerun, share computations on the emerging national and international grid infrastructures. The word infrastructure is used in plural here – indicating our failure to create the grid. Thus GridPilot was born with a pluggable backend support.
Eventually, I created my own take at a grid … Read the rest
In this post I’ll give an overview of the GridFactory software suite (including GridPilot) and provide the minimum information to get started as well as pointers to more thorough documentation.
GridFactory is a software suite composed of the following programs:
GridFactory server– Notice that currently the software has only been tested on Ubuntu-9.10, 10.04 and Fedora-12, 13 – i386*
– Notice also that you must first install SUN/Oracle’s Java (=1.6), either from a distribution repository or directly from Oracle.
Download mod_gacl, mod_gridfactory, gridfactory_server: either use your browser and get the files from
Dear grid warriors: new tools are now available to assist you in your battles. The GridFactory software suite, including GridPilot, is now available for download.
Supported platforms
GridPilot and GridWorker have been tested on the following platforms:
In this post I’ll report on running the application “mc09_7TeV.107691….” from the GridPilot app store. In the case of NorduGrid and WLCG, the ATLAS software is preinstalled on the resources. In the case of GridFactory, the jobs run inside a CernVM appliance with ATLAS software loaded through the AFS network file system. The input dataset consisted of 26 files totaling … Read the rest
In previous posts we saw that I/O bound jobs ran ~3 faster on standard SATA disks than on network file systems and block devices (GPFS, NFS, EBS). This post reports on CPU bound jobs. I ran standard ATLAS Monte Carlo simulation on both grid and cloud resources: imported the ATLAS simulation app and ran the default 100 small jobs, each … Read the rest
In this post, I’ll take a look at some more runs of the “atlas_d3pd_boildown” application available in the GridPilot app store. The difference w.r.t. the runs described in a previous post is that this time I ran on cloud as opposed to grid resources. On dedicated hardware and on two public clouds, Amazon’s EC2 and Cabo’s Irigo cloud, I … Read the rest
Professionally, I recently had to set up some improvised storage, making use of 6 machines, each with a 1 TB disk that was not used for anything else. Preferably with a common name space. Pooling such 6 disks into a common storage solution may sound like a common, mundane task, but there does not appear to be any open-source … Read the rest
In this post, I’ll take a look at some runs of the POV-Ray application available in the GridPilot app store: To import this app, just choose “File → Import application”, navigate to the relevant folder and click “OK”.
This application is a bit more sophisticated than the one used for the simple benchmarking described in a previous post. Now, … Read the rest
This example is special in that it does not depend on any preinstalled software package (runtime environment), but includes a precompiled binary. This binary will of course only for certain run on the system it was compiled on. We compiled on Debian Sarge and Scientific Linux 5 and run on all back-ends: a local virtual machine, GridFactory without virtualization and … Read the rest
Here is a video I put together to demo how to use GridPilot to run computations on a GridFactory cluster:
Given the popularity of the iPhone, an interesting use of a batch system is conversion of movie files from the AVI to the MPG4 format. In this post I’ll explain 3 ways doing this with GridPilot. Which way you prefer will likely depend on the number and size of files you want to convert and the power … Read the rest
To gauge the performance of both GridFactory and virtualization layers in a high-CPU/low-throughput setting, we chose the standard ray-tracing program POV-Ray and a standard benchmarking image, shipped with the program.
This example is a fairly naive benchmarking exercise consisting simply in rendering the same image with POV-Ray 20 times. Each POV-Ray job used a … Read the rest
Plot of ATLAS data created with GridPilot from official datasets.
This example demonstrates the use of GridPilot in data processing in high energy physics (HEP). It makes extensive use of some HEP-specific technologies, that are incapsulated in GridPilot in the form of plugins: the ATLAS DB plugin and the NG and GLite computing system plugins. The jobs chosen are so-called … Read the rest
Canada was great – here’s a couple of pictures from the Summit photo contest:
Went to Summit 09 to give an invited talk in the Workshop “HPC and Grid Computing in the Cloud” (OGF27).
My talk was about what I see as an opportunity to dramatically simplify and improve the infrastructure of scientific computation and collaboration.
I … Read the rest
In the context of the Nordic HPC community, I’ve been involved in some discussions on the applicability of cloud computing in HPC. Also in the blogosphere, the subject is receiving some attention (e.g. at bigdatamatters.com and hpcwire.com).
Here are some comments of mine:
A few times recently I’ve come across an argument that can be summarized by the following … Read the rest
Last week I gave a general talk on cloud computing at the yearly conference “Softwareudvikling på Tværs”, arranged by Teknologisk Institut. The purpose was to inform about what (I consider) cloud computing is, where it is currently used and where it is headed.
The arrangement was well organized and included many interesting talks.
My slides can be found here… Read the rest
Niels Bohr Institute.
Photo by Marcos Vieira.
This is a follow-up to a previous post.
VENUE: Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, 2100, Copenhagen
TIME: May 12, 2009, 14:00
PROGRAM
14:10 – 14:40, “Cloud and Virtualization to Support Grid Computing”,
Ass. Professor Ruben S. Montero , DSA research group, Universidad de Complutense, Madrid
14:40 – 15:00, … Read the rest
Niels Bohr Institute.
Photo by Marcos Vieira.
Together with “Dansk Grid Forum” I’m organizing a small cloud symposium to be held here at the Niels Bohr Institute on May 12. The idea is to have some debate on the prospects for clouds in scientific computing. Sign up here if you’re interested in attending.