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