New features in GRAM4

Recently, an article about new features in GRAM4(aka WS-GRAM) has been published in www.globus.org.

Among new features is worthwhile mention:

• Improvements in fault tolerance support.
• Has been increased the number of active jobs.
• Has been adopted JSDL as job description language.
• A new enhanced delegation scheme.
• and more... (read the article)

Preliminaries tests shown a poor performance related to GRAM2(aka pre Web Services GRAM), however, efforts to address that issue are in progress.

Interesting links...

I want to share with you about a couple interesting links for grid manager and programmer.

GDTE plugin
Eclipse is a popular IDE, whose its main feature is the possibility to integrate easily new functionality inside it, through plugins. For grid services development GDTE is widely accepted in grid community.

• You need download eclipse and then install GDTE plugin.
• Besides, a set of small tutorials for diverse features available in the plugin.

Link for the "Newbie"

Globus Toolkit(GT) is the Grid concept implementation most widely adopted. However, the installation process could be painful because GT consist of a lot of components to need be configure. Globusconsortium has posted a tutorial to install a lot of that components in order to provide a basic grid infrastructure.

Another successful grid history

An interesting article was posted to computerworld. It describes how grid concept was used to compute drug compounds related to malaria. In six months of "grid processing", with around of 5000 computational nodes, 420 years worth of data was process in just four months.

RedHat supporting Virtualization

RedHat has been supporting developments on virtualization. Actually, www.openvirtualization.com, is a site supported by RedHat and inside of it you can find a lot of interesting resources related to virtualization under open technologies.

enjoy it!

Grid and Virtualization

The main subject of discussion is about grid computing, but remarkable topics to be discussed here are:

• Provisioning
• Adaptivity
• Virtualization
• Orchestration

Grid computing aims to provide an infrastructure to gather logically a set of distributed resources in a transparent way to end user. All infrastructure is built on top of non-proprietary and widely accepted protocols.

Important achievements to provide that basic infrastructure has been made, however, distributed environments involves new challenges to be considered.

An important challenge is to build autonomic environments and preliminary developments related to the items enumerate above require be made.

Then, that blog periodically will publish relevant information about it.

regards.