The use of XtreemOS on top of Grid and Cloud computing resources will be the topic of the upcoming workshop "X-HPC, XtreemOS for providing HPC services", hosted at the Department of Computer Science by the new-born HPC center of the University of Pisa.

The HPC center of the University of Pisa experiments with the latest and bleeding edge technology in hardware and software, like GPGPU technologies on ATI and NVIDIAdevices, and has been nominated the first ACER HPC competence center in Europe.

The X-HPC workshop will be held in Pisa, on Wednesday 16 June, in the Gerace room at the Computer Science Department of the University. Several industrial partners of the XtreemOS consortium and of the HPC center, like Kerlabs and Ferrari Racing Division, will join the event to provide their unique expertise and viewpoint. The workshop will showcase the latest XtreemOS LINUX distribution, which is currently under testing and evaluation on top of a network of computing resources provided by the Pisa HPC center, by INRIA, the Aladdin/G5K project, CNR and several other partner institutions of the XtreemOS consortium across all Europe.

Alvaro Martinez Reol (TID) presented the XtreemOS MD flavour during the EuroSys 2010 conference (Paris, France) with a poster, demo and stand.

About 30 people came and visited the stand and both the poster and demo were explained directly to around 15. Conference delegates stopping at the XtreemOS stand seemed to be quite interested, not only in the MD part, but also in learning more about XtreemOS as a whole and about specific XtremOS components (XtreemFS, XtreemOS cluster flavour, use cases...).

Other visitors showed interest in XtreemOS and its possible advantages compared to other Grid solutions while others came to see the poster and GridPlayer video after they participated in the XtreemOS tutorial session.

The XtreemOS tutorial given at EuroSys 2010 consisted of three parts. The first part, presented by Guillaume Pierre (VUA), gave an overview of the system and of its architecture, introducing the VO management model, XtreemFS and the Application Execution Management system. The second part focused on the usage of XtreemOS, showing how the command-line and GUI tools can be used to execute applications and  to store data in a distributed fashion; the speaker for this part was Corina Stratan (VUA).  In the last part of the tutorial, Massimo Coppola (CNR) presented concepts related to the administration and security of XtreemOS, and explained how resources and Virtual Organizations can be managed.

    

The tutorial had approximately 25 participants, and some of them were interested in learning more about XtreemOS. From the questions asked during the tutorial, and also from the discussions that we had after the tutorial with some of the participants,  the aspects of interest were:
- what modules are needed by the XtreemOS kernel, and if there are any requirements for the other XtreemOS components
- if it is possible to package the XtreemOS components for other Linux distributions
- if it is possible to use XtreemOS with a custom job scheduler
- more details about the implementation of the XtreemOS components
- what are the applications used on top of XtreemOS
- in the case when a resource belongs to multiple VOs, how are the multiple certificates managed
- when a user submits a job, how does the system find resources that meet the requirements and that also allow the user to run applications

XtreemOS will be present in Uppsala (Sweden) next April for the 5th EGEE User Forum: http://egee-uf5.eu-egee.org

A demo of the XtreemOS system is scheduled on April 14 (demo session 2): http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceTimeTable.py?confId=69338#all

The submission deadline for the Eurosys Doctoral Workshop is the 14th of February 2010. The workshop is co-located with Eurosys in Paris.

The web page is at http://research.microsoft.com/~risaacs/eurosys10dw.html

Here is a brief description from the organizers:

"The doctoral workshop, which will take place on the day before the main EuroSys 2010 program, will provide a forum for PhD students to present their work and receive constructive feedback from experts in the field as well as from peers. Technical presentations will be augmented with general advice and discussions about getting a PhD, doing research, and post-doctoral careers. We invite applications from PhD students at any stage of their doctoral studies, and plan to have about 30 attendees."

• Improved installer with a new xosautoconfig tool to greatly simply and automate installation of XtreemOS instances.

• A number of high impact bug fixes, along with work on stability and correctness.
• XtreemFS 1.2, which has a number of new features along with enhanced performance and stability
• XtreemOS MD (Mobile Device) - This new version integrates XtreemOS on Internet Tablets, beginning with the Nokia N810. This makes it possible to launch jobs and interact with XtreemOS resources via a special client.
• Virtual Nodes - a framework to provide fault tolerance for grid applications by replicating them over multiple nodes.
• XOSSAGA - a set of technologies to allow you to run SAGA compliant  applications on top of XtreemOS unmodified.

This tutorial presents XtreemOS Grid system from the user point of view. Its goal is to show why XtreemOS is a system of choice for Grid users who want to easily execute their applications while taking advantage of advanced features for job management. We show what can be done with XtreemOS with regards to application execution, how it can be done and how the available features are implemented. Demonstrations will be presented throughout the tutorial.

Target audience: Grid users, Grid application developers, Grid system and middleware designers

Session leaders: Christine Morin (INRIA), Yvon Jégou (INRIA), Toni Cortes (BSC), Michael Schöttner (Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf)

Session agenda

- Overview of XtreemOS
- Dynamic resource discovery for job execution
- Resource management
        - Resource selection
        - Resource reservation
        - Resource (co-)allocation
- Job Management
    - Job control
    - Job dependency management
    - Job monitoring & auditing
    - Support for interactive applications
    - Examples of job execution
        - Workflow
        - MPI applications
- Reliable job execution
    - XtreemOS-GCP checkpointing service for distributed applications
        - Integration of different checkpointer packages
        - Generic callbacks for application-level optimizations
        - Channel checkpointing with heterogenous checkpointer packages
- Executing SAGA applications on XtreemOS

Event date and location

OGF28
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Munich, Germany
March 15-19, 2010

Getting XtreemOS 2.0 RedFlag Asianux Version

The XtreemOS 2.0 RedFlag Asianux Version can be downloaded from the Red Flag website: http://dtoem.redflag-linux.com/hhp/

The source code is available at
https://gforge.inria.fr/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/distribution/packages/asianux/?root=xtreemos

Press release in Chinese

...on Red Flag's website:

http://www.redflag-linux.com/XtreemOS-2-0-Redflag-Asianux.html

In April 2010 XtreemOS will have a half-day tutorial at the EuroSys conference.

We'll present and demonstrate the main features of XtreemOS, reflecting the progress that has been made with the last release.

We are welcoming users and developers of distributed applications, and also Grid system administrators, to participate to this tutorial. The attendees will learn how to use XtreemOS for executing and developing complex applications, for storing distributed data and for managing virtual organizations in a simple way. We hope everybody will enjoy discovering XtreemOS!

The tutorial will be presented by: Corina Stratan (VUA), Massimo Coppola (CNR) and Guillaume Pierre (VUA).

More details on the conference web site:
http://eurosys2010-dev.sigops-france.fr/program.html

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXR0Lm3UVjU

• XtreemFS read-only replication:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0co_-_e0Hq4