Looking for Landmarks--Out There On the Grid
by Sam Dean - Jul. 03, 2008Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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Recently, OStatic covered Eucalyptus, an open source infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly. We've also been covering several interesting projects focused on cloud computing. Rich Wolski, who directs the Eucalyptus project at U.C. Santa Barbara, is an expert on grid computing, and was kind enough to share with me some of the other open source projects he finds notable in this space.
As Rich notes, "the grid side of things has been producing a maturing software base that is probably worth checking out." In particular, he describes Condor as "probably the most successful (and oldest) effort [in this area]--at the University of Wisconsin."
Here's a description of Condor from the team behind it: "The goal of the Condor Project is to develop, implement, deploy, and evaluate mechanisms and policies that support High Throughput Computing (HTC) on large collections of distributively owned computing resources. Guided by both the technological and sociological challenges of such a computing environment, the Condor Team has been building software tools that enable scientists and engineers to increase their computing throughput."
If you look through this list of Condor-related news items, you'll find some highly interesting applications for it. For example, it is being used in the search for alternative fuel resources, and is used in Red Hat's Enterprise MRG grid efforts.
Rich also points to Globus. Globus provides an open source toolkit that is used for building grid systems and applications. Globus has a large community of organizations and individuals working together on new ways to share computing power, databases, and much more.
Globus also has a cloud effort underway. According to the organization's site: "The workspace cloud client allows you to provision customized compute nodes (that we call workspaces) that you have full control over using a leasing model based on the Amazon EC2 service." Anyone can download the cloud client and deploy a workspace.
Finally, Nanohub is a nanoscience-focused effort that looks very interesting. According to Rich: "These guys have quietly been doing distributed virtual image management all over the country for the past 3 or 4 years or so. Their base technology is called Invigo and it is kind of like a wide area cloud." You can find more on Invigo here.
Thanks much to Rich Wolski for these interesting ideas. We hope to check back in on the Eucalyptus project soon.
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