We are happy to announce RC2 of Nimbus 2.5!

This release "rounds out" the new features introduced in RC1, addresses usability concerns, improves and adds documentation, and provides several new developer features. In addition, the release also of course provides bug fixes relative to RC1.

The full changelog information is available at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.5/changelog.html

Nimbus 2.5 RC2 is available for download at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/

The community testing and feedback has been an invaluable help, this has been the most active and productive release candidate cycle that Nimbus has seen and we think it will show in the final release. We would like to thank all who volunteered their effort to help with testing and submitted patches to this release. Specifically, we would like to acknowledge the help of Pierre Riteau, Patrick Armstrong, Paul Marshall, Paulo Motta, Marien Ritzenthaler, Colin Leavett-Brown, and Matt Vliet.

Happy (belated) Independence Day—we have just won independence from a kludgy storage solution and a tyrannical installation system and are happy to announce RC1 of Nimbus 2.5!

This release introduces two major features:

1) Cumulus, a storage cloud implementation that has been integrated with the Workspace Service but can also be used standalone. Cumulus is compatible with the Amazon Web Services S3 REST API, but extends it to include quota management.

2) Zero -> Cloud installation process, which significantly simplifies Nimbus installation and includes user management tools.

In addition, this release also contains new scheduling and network configuration options, new propagation methods, new workspace pilot options, as well as multiple smaller features and bugfixes—too much by far to brag about in this mail; the full list is available in the changelog at: http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.5/changelog.html#2.5

This release would not have been the same without active involvement of the Nimbus open source community. The changelog contains acknowledgements of many members who made substantial contributions: in particular, we’d like to thank Patrick Armstrong, Paulo Motta, Pierre Riteau, and Matt Vliet. They not only contributed new ideas, suggestions, and features but also helped us improve code quality—priceless!

The Nimbus 2.5 release candidate is available for download at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/

Documentation (still in progress) is available at: http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.5/

Researchers from a collaboration of six European organisations have attracted funding worth €2.3million to develop a new Internet-based software project called StratusLab. The two year project, headed up by Project Coordinator Dr Charles Loomis from CNRS, was launched in Paris today (14th June 2010). It aims to enhance distributed computing infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), that allow research and higher education institutes from around the world to pool computing resources.

Funded through the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the two year project aims to successfully integrate ‘cloud computing’ technologies into ‘grid’ infrastructures. Grids link computers and data that are scattered across the globe to work together for common goals, whilst cloud computing makes software platforms or virtual servers available as a service over the Internet, usually on a commercial basis, and provides a way for organisations to access computing capacity without investing directly in new infrastructure. Behind cloud services are data centres that typically house large numbers of processors and vast data storage systems. Linking grid and cloud technologies will result in major benefits for European academic research and is part of the European Commission strategy to develop European computing infrastructures.

StratusLab will integrate, distribute and maintain a sustainable open-source cloud distribution to bring cloud to existing and new grid sites. The StratusLab toolkit will be composed of existing cutting edge open source software, and the innovative service and cloud management technologies developed in the project. The StratusLab toolkit will integrate OpenNebula, the leading open-source toolkit for cloud computing,

Speaking about the project, Project Coordinator Dr Charles Loomis said: “Computer grids are used by thousands of researchers in many scientific fields. For example, the data from the Large Hadron Collider’s experiments, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator situated at CERN in Switzerland, are distributed via an international grid infrastructure to be processed at institutes around Europe and the world. The StratusLab toolkit will make the grid easier to manage and will allow grids to tap into commercial cloud services to meet peak demands. Later it will allow organisations that already provide a grid service to offer a cloud service to academic users, whilst retaining the many benefits of the grid approach.”

The StratusLab project will bring several benefits to the distributed computing infrastructure ecosystem including simplified management, added flexibility, increased maintainability, quality, energy efficiency and resilience of computing sites. It will benefit a wide variety of users from scientists, who can use the systems to run scientific analyses, to system administrators and hardware technicians, who are responsible for running grid services and maintaining the hardware and infrastructure at various resource centres.

The StratusLab project brings together six organisations, all key players with recognised leadership, proven expertise, experience and skills in grid and cloud computing. This collaboration presents a balanced combination of academic, research and industrial institutes with complementary capabilities. The participating organisations include the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France; the DSA-Research Group at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain; the Greek Research and Technology Network S.A., Greece; SixSq Sárl, Switzerland; Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo, Spain, and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

About the StratusLab Project

The StratusLab project consists of numerous collaborators from six European research institutions. A website can be accessed via the following address: www.stratuslab.eu. The project is partially funded by the European Commission through the Grant Agreement RI-261552.

About OpenNebula

OpenNebula is the most advanced open-source toolkit for building private, public and hybrid clouds, offering unique features for cloud management and providing the integration capabilities that many enterprise IT shops need for internal cloud. OpenNebula is the result of many years of research and development in efficient and scalable management of virtual machines on large-scale distributed infrastructures. The technology has been designed to address the requirements of business use cases from leading companies in the context of flagship international projects in cloud computing. For more info: http://www.OpenNebula.org

About European Union Framework Programme 7

The Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) bundles all research-related EU initiatives together under a common roof playing a crucial role in reaching the goals of growth, competitiveness and employment. The framework programme runs a number of programmes under the headings Cooperation, Ideas, People and Capacities. All specific programmes work together to promote and encourage the creation of European poles of scientific excellence. More information on FP7 can be obtained from http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html.

Nimbus is to be featured in a demo at this week's OGF29 in Chicago. The demo involves six Nimbus cloud installations spread across FutureGrid and Grid'5000. Many VMs with up to 1000 cores will be started between the clouds and used to run a single bioinformatics application (BLAST). The demo will also showcase some experimental features in Nimbus for fast propagation of VM images.

From the OGF29 site:

Sky Computing on FutureGrid and Grid'5000

"Sky computing" is an emerging computing model where resources from multiple cloud providers are leveraged to create large scale distributed infrastructures. This demonstration will show how sky computing resources can be used as a platform for the execution of a bioinformatics application (BLAST). The application will be dynamically scaled out with new resources as need arises. This demonstration will also show how resources across two experimental projects: the FutureGrid experimental testbed in the United States and the Grid'5000, an infrastructure for large scale parallel and distributed computing research in France, can be combined and used to support large scale, distributed experiments. The demo will showcase not only the capabilities of the experimental platforms, but also their emerging collaboration. Finally, the demo will showcase several open source technologies. Specifically, our demo will use Nimbus for cloud management, offering virtual machine provisioning and contextualization services, ViNe to enable all-to-all communication among multiple clouds, and Hadoop for parallel fault-tolerant execution of BLAST. (POC: Kate Keahey, Mauricio Tsugawa, ANL; Pierre Riteau, IRISA)

A couple of months ago the OpenNebula open-source project established the OpenNebula Ecosystem in order to promote the different tools, extensions and plug-ins that are available to complement OpenNebula from a wide variety of projects, companies, and research centers. These ecosystem components enhance the functionality provided by the OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit or enable its integration with existing products, services and management tools in the virtualization, cloud and data center ecosystems. Recently two new components have been added to the catalog:

• Deltacloud Driver: Deltacloud RedHat’s project defines a web service API for interacting with cloud service providers and resources in those clouds in a unified manner.
• Libcloud Driver: Libcloud is a pure python client library for interacting with many of the popular cloud server providers.

A team led by Sebastien Goasguen in Clemson University has also contributed a tool for transferring files to Unix machines on a cluster, this Python tool is able to transfer a 10GB file to 450 hosts in less than one hour. scp-wave tool is of great help when deploying virtualized services on very large-scale infrastructures.

In few weeks the project will announce new tools in the ecosystem, like the support for new cloud APIs (now OpenNebula already supports OCCI and EC2-Query).

Ignacio M. Llorente

Please welcome Matt Vliet and Paulo Gomes to the Nimbus community, they were accepted to the Google Summer of Code 2010 to work on Nimbus related projects!

Matt will be working with Ian Gable on HDFS for robust VM propagation, Paulo will be working with Tim Freeman on Spot Instances to maximize cloud utilization.

Thanks Google for your generous support of open source software!

Happy Cinco De Mayo—we too feel like we’ve just won a victory against the odds—and are happy to announce the final Nimbus 2.4 release!

The major feature of this release is a new installer which makes the installation process significantly easier and faster, eliminates the need for a separate Globus container installation, and sets up an embedded certificate authority. Another significant contribution is a refinements to the Nimbus cloud monitoring service including a new feature that aggregates monitoring information from various Nimbus clouds. In addition, the release contains numerous feature enhancements and bug fixes. Check out the full changelog.

The Nimbus 2.4 release is available for download at: http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/

Documentation is available at: http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.4/

Many thanks to folks who contributed their time, comments, and patches during the release candidate process!  We would like to particularly acknowledge Patrick Armstrong, Ian Gable, Paulo Ricardo Motta Gomes, Colin Leavett-Brown, Mike Lowe, Paul Marshall, Pierre Riteau, and Mauricio Tsugawa.

Next year, the Mars MetNet Mission which is formed by the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), Lavochkin Association (LA), the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI) and Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial (INTA), will launch its first probe to planet Mars. The objective of this mission is to establish the next generation observation network for studying its atmosphere, representing this first probe the first “Martian weather station” of many that will come.

Logo of Mars MetNet Mission

One of the aspects to take into account during the probe operational lifetime are the effects of Phobos‘ eclipses. Phobos, one of the two Martian moons, orbits at approximately 9,000 Km from Mars, being its period 7 hours and 39.2 minutes. The prediction of each eclipse is important for the onboard instruments and it evidently depends on the landing coordinates, which won’t be exactly known until few hours before.

For this reason, an application has been developed at the Faculty of Mathematics of Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which traces Phobos’ trajectories given the coordinates and the required time.  Execution times were too high to consider traditional computing solutions, but the tracing period could be divided at will. This way, the problem could be parameterized and the resulting distributed application, executed on the Cloud.

Answering the question of which and how many resources must be instantiated on a public cloud to obtain a compromise between the time and cost, a valid model for executing this application on Amazon EC2 has been formulated. Depending on the required simulation time, the model returns the best task tracing period along with the number and type of virtual machines.

Phobos' eclipse caught by NASA's rover Opportunity

As a result of this collaboration, the present work has been accepted for its presentation under the title “A Model for Efficient Onboard Actualization of an Instrumental Cyclogram for the Mars MetNet Mission on a Public Cloud Infrastructure” at the PARA2010: State of the Art in Scientific and Parallel Computing Conference, that will be held in Reykavík (Iceland) on June 6-9, 2010.

From similar stories, it seems that Cloud Computing is aiming beyond the clouds.

We are pleased to announce the second release candidate of Nimbus 2.4 (RC2). In response to excellent community feedback, we’ve identified and fixed several problems with RC1. We’ve also significantly improved the documentation and installation experience.

For a detailed list of changes between RC1 and RC2, consult the changelog.

This has been one of the most active and helpful release candidate periods we have ever had.  Many thanks to everyone that has contributed their time, comments, and patches!  We would like to especially thank Patrick Armstrong, Ian Gable, Paulo Ricardo Motta Gomes, Colin Leavett-Brown, Mike Lowe, Paul Marshall, Pierre Riteau, and Mauricio Tsugawa.

We are happy to announce release candidate 1 (RC1) of Nimbus 2.4. The major feature of this release is a new installer which makes the installation process significantly easier and faster, eliminates the need for a separate Globus container installation, and sets up an embedded certificate authority. In addition, the release contains enhancements to the Nimbus cloud monitoring service including a new feature that aggregates monitoring information from various Nimbus clouds.

This RC1 also contains numerous smaller improvements, and bug fixes. Check the changelog for details.

The RC1 is available for download at: http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/

Documentation for the new release is available here.

We appreciate help from all who volunteered to alpha test this release. To help provide an easy vehicle for feedback and resolve issues quickly we offer real-time access to a Nimbus RC chatroom for serious alpha testers. If you would like to participate, please contact us for access.

Congratulations to Pierre Riteau for winning the Grid5000 large scale deployment challenge!

Pierre demonstrated an automated install of Nimbus clouds onto several large clusters. He went on to use these clouds to launch virtual clusters. And he did all of this in front of an audience. Very impressive, Pierre.

This year OpenNebula has been selected as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organization. GSoC is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. During the last six years GSoC has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than 3,000 mentors  from nearly 100 countries worldwide. For more information about the program take a look to the GSoC FAQ.

We are very excited about this great opportunity to work with very talented and self-motivated students. During the summer the students will be part of our community, and will have the opportunity to learn the basics of virtualization, cloud computing and OpenNebula.

If you are a student, and would be interested in participating in GSoC with OpenNebula as your mentoring organization, please take a look at our GSoC Ideas page.  This page lists projects that OpenNebula has proposed for GSoC, but it is not a closed list.  If you have an idea for a cool project that uses or extends OpenNebula, please contact one of the OpenNebula  GSoC mentors.  Also, if you are teaching distributed/cloud computing or related courses please share this information with your students.

Once you are ready to submit an application, remember that you must do so before April 9th through the GSoC webapp. So come and join us this summer to improve the OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit!

Ruben S. Montero