http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/ en Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:49:33 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.hpccommunity.org/images/misc/rss.jpg http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/ http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/see-you-sc08-next-week-97/ Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:46:17 GMT If you've been around the HPC space for a while, you'll be feeling the same sense of anticipation that I am for the Supercomputing conference (SC08) happening next week in Austin. Platform will be there (booth 1627), and I'll be in the booth from 12:30pm to 3:00pm every day, so come on by to say hello!

I also want to let people know about the HPC Profile BoF that's happening on Wed from 5:30pm to 7:00pm, and invite all to come and see the exciting things happening in the world of HPC standards.

See you next week! ]]> csmith http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/see-you-sc08-next-week-97/ http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/lets-hope-cloudy-days-ahead-96/ Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:57:05 GMT Last week, I attended the "Cloud Computing and Beyond: The Web Grows Up (finally)" conference hosted by SDForum in Santa Clara. The purpose of the conference seemed to be to provide a snapshot of where the software market currently sits with respect to cloud computing right now, as well as provide some vision as to where things are going. There was a lot of great content, mostly in the format of panels, which I enjoy quite a bit compared to just presentations.

There were a couple of themes that jumped out at me during the day. First was the sentiment that cloud computing doesn't magically make your applications "run better". It takes a good deal of forethought to properly design an application to make use of the Cloud. In fact, the type of thinking that is needed to make an application run well in the cloud can equally serve an application running on your own infrastructure, since much of what makes an application cloud-ready has to do with planning for scalability and reliability (building on cloud infrastructure just makes this more explicit). As somebody who has been helping people "grid-enable" applications for a long while now, this is not new, but I was happy to hear that nobody really believe in a cloud computing "free lunch".

The second interesting point that I took away from the conference was a provocative point made by one of the panelists in the "Crawl/Walk/Run" panel. To the question of "what makes one service more cloudy than another?", Jason Hoffman from Joyent made the contentious claim that nobody's service (including their own) was "cloudy" at all! He claimed that the fundamental property of "cloudiness" emerged when services in the cloud were truly transparently accessed by the end-user. He used as an example Amazon's S3 service. Right now, S3 isn't cloudy, because I knowingly access it remotely over the internet. In order to make a service cloudy, he imagined the following scenario:

• A company wants to provide S3 service to their users, but wants to carve out their own "s3.mycompany.com" domain for the services. They arrange this with Amazon so that it looks, to company users, like the service is provided by the company itself.
• In order to enhance the performance of the system, and to exercise a little more control over their own destiny in the face of changes to Amazon's service, they deploy their own S3 internally (imagine Amazon providing an "S3 appliance" that they plug into their own data centre). This internal S3 is still provided to users as s3.mycompany.com.
• Now, in order to realize some of the benefits of Amazon's hosted S3 service, this internal S3 and Amazon S3 can communicate, such that an outage in the internal service would be picked up by the remote service, etc, etc. To the end user, it all looks the same. s3.mycompany.com is where they get their storage service, regardless of whether the requests go to an internal box, or the remote S3 service.

Once you attain this level of transparency and seamless access, you have a service that is truly "cloudy". End users consume a service, with the same ease-of-use and cost model as S3 provides, but with a mix and match infrastructure approach that can meet the needs of small, medium and large sized organizations.

To achieve this transparency you need some level of interoperability (whether through common software stacks or standards remains to be seen), but once achieved, the true vision of "cloud computing" (elastic resources provided and charged by consumption) can be realized.

So here's to cloudy days ahead! ]]> csmith http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/lets-hope-cloudy-days-ahead-96/ http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/ogf24-use-cases-drive-standards-95/ Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:32:20 GMT The Open Grid Forum recently held it's 24th meeting at the Biopolis in Singapore, co-located with GridAsia2008. OGF meetings are a great way to learn about Grid activities happening worldwide, and OGF24 was no exception. There was definitely cloud on the mind, as evidenced by a keynote from Peter Coffee of salesforce.com and with some buzz around Singapore as one of the data centre locations for the HP/Intel/Yahoo cloud initiative. There was also a good, solid program around enterprise and e-research activities in Grid, with both a local and international focus.

For my part, as VP of the standards function at OGF, I was happy to see continued efforts around converging standards activities in the compute space (JSDL/BES/GLUE/UR), as well as some emerging activity on providing more metering and control at the network layer in the "grid stack". I ran one session at OGF24 that was intended to highlight these activities. The (perhaps mis-named) Introduction to OGF Standards workshop was intended to present the standards work of OGF, not from a working groups and specifications point of view, but from the point of view of those who are building grid systems, and thus have a use case view of their needs. The intention of the workshop was to help answer the questions about how the alphabet soup of specifications come together to solve real-world problems.

There were four main presentations:

1. Federated Data Access
2. ISV Integration with Remote Computing
3. Job Submission and Management Using Meta-Schedulers
4. Network Monitoring and Usage

(The presentations are available from the session summary link above.)

As someone involved in defining specifications at OGF, I must admit that we sometimes lose sight of the big picture in our working group sessions, so it is very useful to step back once in a while and see a landscape of how all these things fit together. We need to remember that use cases drive the standards activities, and not the other way around! ]]> csmith http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/ogf24-use-cases-drive-standards-95/ http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/certification-hpc-system-administration-80/ Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:50:58 GMT I saw this post over at ClusterMonkey. It's about a new training program at Georgetown's Advanced Research Computing that is intended to train people to be system administrators for HPC systems. I think this is a good idea. There is enough difference between running general purpose systems and HPC systems, and a lot of the tuning can be quite different, so preparing people for this particular kind of specialization is well due. ]]> csmith http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/certification-hpc-system-administration-80/ http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/structure08-79/ Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:58:46 GMT This week I attended the Structure08 conference held here in San Francisco. The theme of the conference was "Cloud" and the topics ranged from issues scaling out web applications to getting your cloud startup funded.

I particularly enjoyed Werner Vogels keynote on Amazon Web Services, and the way that Amazon got into the business of "Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)". There were also some very good panel sessions. Overall, I liked the format of the conference and the breadth of content, although I think that the notion of "cloud" is already becoming over hyped, with everybody and their dog wanting to be part of the cloud ecosystem. I guess that's just part of the industry we're part of. :)

You can see summaries of the Structure08 sessions at the GigaOM Structure08 live coverage post. ]]> csmith http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/structure08-79/ http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/ogf23-highlights-70/ Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:04:48 GMT OGF23 was held last week in Barcelona in conjunction with the BEinGRID industry days events. OGF events, in addition to having great program content,... OGF23 was held last week in Barcelona in conjunction with the BEinGRID industry days events. OGF events, in addition to having great program content, are an excellent way to keep in touch with Grid computing practitioners all over the world, and OGF23 was no exception.

Some of the highlights for me.....

Standards Convergence

For a number of years now I have worked on specifications for interfaces to job management systems in the form of JSDL, OGSA-BES, HPC Profile and friends. We're now to the point where we have multiple implementations of these specifications, such as the BES++ project. What we had "punted" on for quite a while is a comprehensive information model that could be used to describe the resources available to run jobs on. This gap is now possible to fill with the publishing of the GLUE schema as a public comment document! While standards in general are not designed to excite, seeing all these bits and pieces come together after a long time is very satisfying for those of us who have been working on them. Good work GLUE-WG!

Cloud Workshop and Sessions

Cloud was a big theme of the conference, with some great content in the form of a keynote from Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon), and with 2 workshop sessions on cloud with presentations from Cohesive FT and CERN among others. It's still not clear how Grids and Clouds converge, but intuitively there is an intersection point somewhere.

OGF-Europe

OGF-Europe is an EU funded project that is intended to help collect information on the use of Grid in Europe, as well as promote the use of Grid across multiple industries and customer sizes. As somebody who works on standards, it is easy to get wrapped up in the small details of how things work, and to see OGF as providing a valuable venue for doing this work. What is hard is to see the bigger picture around Grid usage and value to organizations. OGF-Europe will definitely provide some much needed external (to OGF) facing activities. Hopefully they will create some demand for our specs!

Green IT Workshop

The Grid Computing Now team organized 2 workshops on the opportunity to use Grid techniques to make data centres more efficient and environmentally friendly.

Data Management Sessions

The session presentations can be found here. The European Grid community presented on the various techniques that they have used to deal with very large and distributed data sets, for both files and relational data. I never knew that anybody was using Oracle RAC on over 140 servers!


For some other perspectives on the conference (and some video highlights) check out the GridCast at OGF23 blog. ]]> csmith http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/ogf23-highlights-70/ http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/introducing-myself-69/ Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:23:19 GMT For my first blog entry I'd like to take the time to introduce myself. My name is Chris Smith, and I'm a product architect at Platform Computing. What does this really mean? I spend time looking at what sorts of problems people are trying to address in the Grid and HPC community, and I try to figure out how to either apply Platform's technologies to solve those problems, or look at new technologies that can be used with Platform's technologies and know how to solve the problem.

I also am very involved in the Open Grid Forum, where I have attended for a number of years engaged in writing specifications for interoperable job management. I also happen to be the VP of the standards function of the OGF, meaning I help organize a great group of people, who together manage the working groups and the document process of the OGF.

On this blog, I hope to talk a little bit about my research interest areas, as well as talk a little bit about what is going on in the world of standards. ]]> csmith http://www.hpccommunity.org/blogs/csmith/introducing-myself-69/