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Podcast of the Week - Alan Sill of OGF discusses standards, grids, and clouds

Open Grid Forum Vice President of Standards, Alan Sill.
Image courtesy of Alan Sill

It’s been a few months since Alan Sill took over the position of vice president of standards for the Open Grid Forum. Now that he’s had a chance to settle into his new position, Derek Stevens of Cloud Commons has posted an in-depth interview with Sill.
Currently, Sill is a senior scientist at Texas Tech University, where he helped to establish a CMS Tier-3 center and held key positions within TIGRE and PEGrid. He is a charter member of The Americas Grid Policy Management Authority, and has contributed to a variety of working groups within Open Science Grid and the OGF over the years. At the moment he participates in the LHC CMS experiment as a physicist, and contributes to SURAgrid on a regular basis.
According to Sill, a full set of standards for grid computing would necessarily address many of the s

Opinion: What would Linnaeus do?

Carl Linnaeus on his wedding day, holding in his right hand a specimen of Linnear borealis — his favorite plant, said Magnus Lidén, curator of the Uppsala University Botanic Garden. Image courtesy Uppsala University Art Collection

Elizabeth Leake of TeraGrid — the high-performance, distributed computing network in the USA — was a guest at the EGEE User Forum, the recent conference in Europe on high-throughput computing. Here, she gives her impressions about a technology challenge faced by both types of computing: Long-term, persistent storage.
 
One of the highlights of visiting the conference venue in Uppsala, Sweden, was learning about Carl Linnaeus.
Born in nearby Råshult in 1707, Linnaeus  moved to the college town of Uppsala to study, and quickly became a cornerstone of the university. He died in 1778 and was laid to rest in Uppsala Cathedral — largest in all of Scandinavia.
Linnaeus was fam

Q & A: Larry Rudolph talks about pervasive computing, virtualization, and science

Image courtesy of Larry Rudolph.

We’ve all heard about how pervasive computing will change the way we connect and compute in our everyday lives. But what about the way we do science? How is that going to change?
Larry Rudolph joined VMware in 2008 to help start a project on mobile phone virtualization, after five years as part of Project Oxygen: Pervasive Human-Centric Computing at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Read on to find out what he had to say about pervasive computing, virtualization, and science.
iSGTW: How would you define virtualization or virtual machines?
Rudolph: A virtual machine is a computer made out of software. It is just like a regular computer. It can run programs, and it has a file system, mouse, keyboard, and display. Virtual machines run on physical computers, but it can be easily moved from one physical machine to another an

Announcement:  iSGTW Survey — Please fill out!

Image courtesy Irum Shahid,  stock.xchng

Want to be entered in a drawing for a fabulous, free GridCafé T-shirt, coffee mug or hat?Then be sure to check your email, and fill out one of our anonymous readership surveys. Or you can click here.
The prizes are our way of thanking you for your continued support and interest as iSGTW passes another year of publication. We now reach 5,684 subscribers, providing information, news and reviews that keep grid computing in the spotlight.To continue improving this service, we need your feedback, suggestions and recommendations for iSGTW. What stories would you like to see covered? How can we make iSGTW better?So, please fill out our survey.Remember: iSGTW also welcomes your contributions — news, images or videos, announcements and opinion pieces. Please drop us a line if you’d like to contribute or if you have a good lead.And don’t forget about the T-s

Feature - FOOTWAYS takes its first steps

Footways started quite literally in the back of someone’s garage. Image courtesy Igor Dubus

Google, Hewlett Packard and Apple all had humble beginnings in the back of someone’s garage. Could the same be true in the back of a garage in Orleans, France?
“I had never seen a router/switch in my life, I had to get into VPN, network, perl scripting. I also had problems with electricity supply and consumption — this was my home, not a dedicated IT room,” says Igor Dubus.
This was only the beginning. Having built a 96-node cluster in his garage to run computer models as the coordinator of the FOOTPRINT project (iSGTW ran an article about FOOTPRINT earlier this year,) Dubus launched his own start-up company, called FOOTWAYS. His goal is to develop this “garage-cluster” into a 12,000-node high performance computing center dedicated to pesticide modeling.
FOOTPRINT, an EU project, seeks to minimize water contam

Feature - Cruise control for eScience Image courtesy of howstuffworks.com. The paper “Feedback-Controlled Resource Sharing for Predictable eScience” by Sang-min Park and Marty Humphrey of the University of Virginia figured in the list of finalists for the SC08 Best Student Paper. This article is based on Park’s SC08 presentation on this work.As dynamic, data-driven applications become more common on the grid, it’s tougher to guarantee when any given job will run, and more importantly, finish. For time-critical applications—weather, coastal hazard prediction, and other disaster-prevention—a late result is as bad as no result.Standard batch-mode scheduling cannot predictably support time-dependent, adaptive computing demand, says Sang-min Park, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia. It can’t change a job’s completion time with fine granularity or cope reliably with unanticipated disturbances. Deadline-guaranteed processing is the key to success for time-critical applications.A

Grid computing walks the standard line: thinking inside the box With many projects involved, truly seamlesss interoperability can be a challenge.Image courtesy of NorduGrid and Vicky White“Standard” is often equated with “average” or “boring.” How can you innovate or invent when you’re bound by standards and regulations? How can you push the boundaries when you’re stuck inside a box?Yet how can you create something on a grand scale—something that can slot into place with other grand things—unless you create something interoperable. Something . . . standard.In this special feature, former iSGTW editor (and now GridTalk editor) Cristy Burne reports on this easily overlooked aspect of grid computing. Why should we care? Standardizing grids: the current landscape Challenges for the future The way forward A standard in action: GridFTP A “de facto” standard: VOMSBONUS FEATURE: What does the grid community have to say about standards? (See what people from inst

  Feature - Behind the scenes with Mission Control: project managing massive grid projects Some of the faces that keep grid projects rolling ahead.Images courtesy of Open Science Grid and EGEEBehind every megabyte there is a mega-bit of teamwork.And behind every data delivery there is a project deliverable. Who coordinates these distributed computing projects, with their distributed partners and distributed priorities? iSGTW heads to Mission Control to find out. Chander Sehgal – Project Associate for Open Science Grid Anna Cook – Project Administration for Enabling Grids for E-sciencE   Chander Sehgal: “We have a shared mission, and that’s where the power of this collaboration comes from.”Images courtesy of Open Science Grid  Chander Sehgal – Open Science GridWhat is your role with OSG? I joined Open Science Grid in January 2007 and handle OSG’s project and budget management. We’re a medium-sized project employing several dozen people, and there are

  Feature - Open Grid Forum maintains focus on the 2010 goal Grids are about scaling IT, and community organizations such as Open Grid Forum are essential to guiding and managing this growth process, says John Ehrig, Open Grid Forum enterprise and marketing program manager.Images courtesy of Open Grid Forum Now involving more than 300 organizations from 50 countries, the Open Grid Forum community has gathered at this week's OGF21 to continue progress towards grids standards development. Open Grid Forum Enterprise and Marketing Program Manager, John Ehrig, explains the goals and progress of this community-initiated not-for-profit organization.Driven by accelerating globalization, organizations and individuals are being challenged to work in new ways—often across departments, disciplines and large geographical areas. Technology silos that inhibit the flow of information, innovation and commerce are being broken apart and rebuilt to better serve this new business paradigm. Grid and grid-like technologies—including