Groovy...

Groovy looks as another scripting language. But it takes advantage of to be a son of Java.

Nobody denies about the fact of the large set of java libraries available to internet: networking, processing management, distributed systems, virtualization and so on.

Scripting languages help to speed up the prototyping development, for example: ruby, python, perl, among others. Groovy is a scripting language that takes the best of two worlds: huge set of libraries and increase expressiveness of the Java language. Its first stable release to january 2007, asides count with an excellent companion book Groovy in Action becomes a Groovy an excellent prototyping tool.

Java programmers will found it very useful because allows easy lists handle, asides closure concept presents to Groovy as sophisticated java based tool, furthermore smart XML interaction, database connectivity, file management, and so forth.

Since Java(95) born, never a project exciting me so much as Groovy did. Remember, "Standing on the shoulders of giants". Groovy stands on Java giant, your project stands on Groovy?

Grid computing is a great idea, but a lot of work needs to be done in order to approach to scientific community from diverse branches of knowledge.

Tools and your creativity will approximate grid to most people.

• Groovy homepage All you need to start to play with Groovy.
• Groovy in Action (Amazon)
• Groovy in Action (Manning publications) with sample chapters, furthermore book's samples source code.
  

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.

Grid today...

hi,

This week i read the article posted by gcn with interesting remarks about the strength and weakness related to state of the art of grid computing.

Here, i will summarize the key points on that article and give some final remarks.

The article not intend to be an attack to grid technology, but give important sights about what expectations remain in technological community.

Grid computing, according to the article, is a succeed technology, that has a lot of investments and research. Today, there exist research projects such as SURAgrid Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction, Globus Medicus; to shown the real possibilities with grid technology.

Globus Toolkit, is the piece of software most widely deployed on grid environments, however looks immature in critical issues such as the installation and management. The installation process is manual and many steps of the procedure is painful.

About, Globus Toolkit the article says: “It is still in its infancy. Automated job submission and resource allocation across a set of machines is still a difficult thing to do,”

Today, there exist software and hardware infrastructure to support the grid technologies, but a long road still remain to cross in order to achieve the Foster and Kesselman's dream.

We envision using idle computational resources, perhaps using new software with grid technology in mind, besides legacy software, we expect to run on the grid platform, too. Licensing problem is an issue in last scenario, because, commercial software is licensed either by user or by machine, therefore, run a commercial software on thousands of cpu machines could be no possible.

Another drawback, is lack of grid support. Globus today is living a similar experience like to Linux were live early in 90s, where only geeks charmed to newcomer technology are the support available at this moment.

However a big difference exist between Linux and Globus. Linux is a technology related to operating systems, concepts are widely studied on computer career, but distribute computing many times is not a core topic of study. Therefore, although there exist many people interested in distributed computing, there exist many technological flavors to deal with that kind of problem. Proprietary, open source, free of licensing among others, populate the internet, but, grid computing begin to gain momentum, and emerges like the most popular distributed technology.

The industry has been doing investment on academy to favor the developments on grid computing. Huge companies as HP, Sun, IBM and Microsoft bid for the new hype of the technology, many times with their own proprietary tools.

You can see Globus Toolkit as the Linux of the grid computing. Many of us, will be testers and will provide ideas, another people around are the engine to keep moving the Globus development.

I hope that this big dream become true, not only with proprietary deployments of Grid Computing, but Open Grid Computing available to do development of the future applications such as games, communication tools, development tools, databases, and so forth.

Finally, i do a couple of questions: Is the grid computing the born of a new paradigm to computation? What new theories has to be developed to support ideas, now applied to grid computing, ideas related to performance, fault-tolerance, adaptivity, uncertainty, and orchestration?