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Entries For: November 2009

2009-11-17

Get acquainted with one XtreemOS partner: Ulm University (UULM)

Ulm University is located in the southern part of Germany. It was founded in 1967 and is therefore a rather young university. Nowadays there are about 7 000 students with main subjects in medicine, natural sciences, mathematics, economics, engineering and computer sciences. The computer science department has about 20 professors doing research and teaching in all major areas of computer science. Ulm University is partner of XtreemOS with the Aspectix Research Team as part of the Institute for Distributed Systems. The team and its 7 researchers are working on multimedia platforms, middleware systems for adaptive applications and fault tolerance.

UULM

 

UULM contribution to XtreemOS

 

  • Virtual Nodes

The main task of UULM in XtreemOS is the development of a fault tolerance infrastructure called Virtual Nodes that can be used for grid applications but also for XtreemOS-internal services. Virtual Nodes are a framework providing multiple configurable implementations for replication support, e.g., Virtual Nodes provide active and passive replication protocols. The most innovative element of Virtual Nodes is the support of concurrency for replicated services due to different deterministic scheduling algorithms. For adding new replicas a special join protocol was developed that supports consistent state checkpoints even with concurrent service activities. Current work is the integration of Virtual Nodes technology into the XtreemOS job management services. The integration into security services is under consideration.

  • Distributed Servers

In cooperation with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA), UULM has contributed to the Distributed Server system that allows clients to use a fixed server address. The corresponding server socket can be moved between different server instances. UULM is working on the integration of Distributed Server technology with Virtual Nodes, which allows clients to remain completely agnostic about replication.

XtreemOS 2.0 release now available!

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XtreemOS 2.0 Release

 

Rennes, France Nov 12, 2009The XtreemOS project has released the second public release of its Linux-based Grid operating system under the motto "Making Grid Computing Easier". The consortium has conceived and integrated a platform of open source technologies to enable easier usage, management, scalability and programming on top of Grid computing resources.

 

XtreemOS brings new capabilities to Grids, such as easing job submission and monitoring, while providing a comprehensive security implementation and virtual organization management. XtreemOS comes in three flavours: The PC flavour makes it possible to aggregate standalone PCs as computation resources into XtreemOS Grids. The XtreemOS cluster flavour is based on Kerrighed's LinuxSSI (single system image) technology. LinuxSSI is a Linux cluster providing users an image of a single large system. The third flavour, XtreemOS Mobile has been tailored to run XtreemOS services on mobile devices, such as Nokia Internet Tablets.

 

The 2.0 release version includes the following functionalities:

     

    Creation and management of dynamic virtual organizations The security infrastructure includes a set of services that guarantee the secure operation of the system, providing management of credentials, permissions and resources.

     

    Application execution management AEM is able to search available nodes that fulfill the application needs from within a large number of candidates and then execute the application on the selected nodes. AEM provides job and resource monitoring so that users can get a Linux-like view of their applications. A new experimental feature in this release is the ability to run interactive jobs such as graphical applications unmodified; harnessing the power of a Grid system. In addition, there is a new graphical tool for editing and managing job submissions. Lasty, grid checkpointing and job migration has been integrated into this version.

     

    XtreemFS is a replicated and distributed object-based file system. It allows scaling an installation by adding machines with free storage resources. It offers striping of files over multiple storage servers for high performance parallel access. Furthermore, it supports automated mounting of home volumes.

     

    XOSAGA programming interface The XOSAGA API is built using the Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA) standard from the Open Grid Forum (OGF). It provides access to XtreemOS resources and services.

     

    Xosautoconfig is a new tool included in the distribution, which assists Grid administrators and other users to quickly deploy XtreemOS nodes on Virtual Machines, Grids and test beds.

 

With this release, the XtreemOS consortium invites the participation of external contributors and feedback. XtreemOS is open source and GPL/BSD licensed. For more info please email: contact@xtreemos.eu There is a lively developer channel on #xtreemos-dev on irc.freenode.net, as well.

 

Getting XtreemOS

The second public version based on Mandriva Linux isos can be downloaded from the project website: software. The source code is available at http://gforge.inria.fr/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/?root=xtreemos Also available in the distribution are sample applications and demos.

 

About XtreemOS

Partially funded by the sixth framework programme (Contract FP6-033576) of the European Commission, XtreemOS is a 4-year research project, comprised of 19 academic and enterprise partners in Europe and China that aims to develop a Linux based grid operating system to simplify the usage, management and programming of grids.

 

Website: www.xtreemos.eu

 

2009-11-12

Slides of summer school available online!

The first XtreemOS summer school took place in Oxford, UK, last September 7-11, 2009.

The presentation slides are now available here (in technical programme).

2009-11-04

Get acquainted with one XtreemOS partner: Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)

 Early in 2004 the Ministry of Education and Science (Spanish Government), Generalitat de Catalunya (local Catalan Government) and Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) took the initiative of creating a National Supercomputing Center in Barcelona. BSC-CNS (Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación) is the National Supercomputing Facility in Spain and was officially constituted in April 2005. BSC-CNS manages MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, located at the Torre Girona chapel. The mission of BSC-CNS is to investigate, develop and manage information technology in order to facilitate scientific progress. With this aim, special dedication has been taken to areas such as Computational Sciences, Life Sciences and Earth Sciences.

All these activities are complementary to each other and very tightly related. In this way, a multidisciplinary loop is set up: our exposure to industrial and non-computer science academic practices improves our understanding of the needs and helps us focusing our basic research towards improving those practices. The result is very positive both for our research work as well as for improving the way we service our society.

 

XtreemOS overall architecture

 

BSC contribution to XtreemOS

 

  • Application execution management

The main task of BSC in XtreemOS is to lead the research and development of the Application Execution Management (AEM) module. This module is in charge of setting the whole environment to run jobs in the grid (build reservations, allocate resources, schedule jobs, launch processes, etc.) and to control and monitor them (maintaining the state, allow thread-level monitoring, etc.).

 

Specifically BSC is highly involved in the scalable job management avoiding any kind of bottleneck as well as on the monitoring that allows users to monitor a job just as if it were a Linux process (you can even monitor the change of thread states). 

  • XtreemFS

 In the data management module, the storage system research group is in charge of the algorithm to locate the best replica of a file as well as to decide when and where replicas should be created and/or removed. This mechanism is base on an improved version of the Vivaldi algorithm that places all XtreemOS nodes into a 2D space based on communication latencies.

  • Mobile-device flavor

Regarding mobile devices, BSC is cooperating with TiD to build the embedded version of XtreemOS to be run on mobile devices. Mainly, BSC is working on the AEM and XtreemFS modules of XtreemOS-G for these devices. 

  • Applications 

Finally, BSC is porting two applications trying to take full advantage of the benefits of this new system. These applications are specweb 2005 and hmmpfam which runs on top of COMPSs a workflow manager that is also ported to its full efficiency to XtreemOS by BSC.