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.

Next Thursday November 12th, we will be hosting an Edition of CloudCamp that will take place in our Faculty.

But, what’s CloudCamp? CloudCamp is an unconference where attendees can exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supporting environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies. As an informal, member-supported gathering, it relies entirely on volunteers to help with meeting content, speakers, meeting locations, equipment and membership recruitment.

So, are you interested? Get more info and register now!

This year, our Research Group is glad to participate in the Google Summer of Code.

At this very moment, two project ideas inspired in the GridWay Metascheduler are being offered to worldwide students:

• GridWay + Google Maps Mashup: GridWay users retrieve information about the Grid resources they have access to and their jobs using the commands gwhost and gwps. Even if the given information is complete, a Command Line Interface doesn’t provide the user the big picture of what’s going on. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a GoogleMap will be worth a million. The objective is to provide a wrapper to these commands and use the GoogleMaps API to represent geographically the Grid activity (More Info).

• Develop a GUI for GridWay: GridWay provides its users with a complete and powerful set of commands for job submission and monitoring. However, not all users are made for a Command Line Interface, so GridWay is asking for a neat Graphical User Interface. With this GUI, users should be able to compose and manage their jobs. There isn’t a preferred technology for this implementation (GTK+, Qt, Java, …) so a reasoned choice would be accepted (More Info).

Student application period opens on March 23rd and closes on April 3rd. Check the timeline for more information about important dates!

José Luis Vázquez-Poletti

Alejandro Lorca

Next week the DSA Group has an appointment in Catania, Italy. There, the OGF25 and EGEE 4th UF will be held.

We will participate in many activities such as giving tutorials and talks, all of them having to do with both Grid and Cloud Computing.

And once again, I was honored by GridCast as I was chosen for blogging from the Conference.

So, if you are interested in following our group almost at real time, click here to read all the related posts!

José Luis Vázquez-Poletti

If you followed us at GridCast during the EGEE08 Conference, you would surely have realized that it has been a busy week. Here you may find a little summary of our activities, not considering all the internal meetings where we were participating.

Our week started on Saturday 20th, when a Training Event took place. It was devoted to gLite and the RESPECT (Recommended External Sofware for EGEE CommuniTies) Tools. Being GridWay one of these, I gave a Tutorial where users learned everything from the user point of view, from Command Line Interface to the DRMAA API. The last part of this Tutorial was devoted to questions from attendees, who were already installing GridWay in their “Home Grids”.

On Tuesday 23rd, our group had a double participation at the Demo/Poster Session. Firstly, Javier was presenting a Poster devoted to OpenNebula, showing how it transforms a physical infrastructure into a virtual infrastructure by dynamically overlaying VMs over physical resources. He complemented the poster with a demo which helped the many visitors to understand this technology.

In the meanwhile, I was conducting a demo of a Bioinformatics application running on the Grid using GridWay at a Demo Booth devoted to the EGEE Grid Application Porting Support Group. The aim of this group is to help users on their road of application porting onto the Grid. This task is accomplished by providing information and training about procedures and technologies. Additionally, our Demo Booth was given the “Best Demo” Award by the EGEE Project Office! The second one in an EGEE Conference!

On Wednesday 24th, Tino gave a Talk where he explained the many important benefits of using the OpenNebula engine in your working environment, such as cluster consolidation, high availability, support for planned maintenance and changing capacity availability, performance partitioning, protection against malicious use of resources… Regarding user interaction, he remarked that its main benefit is the support for heterogeneous workloads with multiple (even conflicting) software requirements, allowing the execution of software with strict requirements as jobs that will only run with a specific version of a library or legacy application execution.

And finally, Thursday 25th was the busiest day of the week for us. Firstly, Eduardo gave a Talk where he highlighted the workload capabilities of GridWay, so attendees could understand the benefits of this technology for both Grid users and administrators.

Next Talk during the day was given by Ignacio. He explained how Cloud Computing could be a solution for supporting Grid Computing. This Talk also served as a wrap-up of the rest of OpenNebula related presented works. This new paradigm and its implementation with OpenNebula attracted many interested people, so Rubén performed a Demo at the end of the Session.

And the last Talk at EGEE08 was mine. There I showed some working examples of application that were ported onto the Grid and are running at production state. We understand that as there are no users alike, the same happens to applications that need Grid Computing. This was the reason of why I remarked the specific difficulties of each application and how they had been bypassed.

José Luis Vázquez-Poletti

Next week we will attend the EGEE08 Conference at Instabul, Turkey. There, we will give a Tutorial on the GridWay Metascheduler, two Demos (both GridWay and OpenNebula related) and several Talks (Grid and Cloud Computing).

Additionally, I have been chosen to participate at GridCast (from the same people of GridCafe) as an official blogger.

GridCast takes you behind the scenes of some of the most exciting grid computing events in the world. Share in the excitement as renowned speakers reveal the latest in grid technologies and grid-powered scientific results; check out what happens after dark at post-conference parties, where much of the real networking happens…

Obviously, I have accepted this commitment with great pleasure. So, if you are interested in following our group almost at real time, click here to read all the related posts!

José Luis Vázquez-Poletti

Greetings from CERN, where the World Wide Web and the EGEE Project were born.

Here I am, attending a very special training event: EGEE III Training the Trainers. I’m teaching several national grid initiatives representatives how to use GridWay, so they will be able to do so in further tutorials. Trainers (trainees in this case) were able to understand the basics of GridWay, not only from a theoretic point of view, but also via several examples that involved command line interface and programming using the DRMAA C API, which is an Open Grid Forum standard widely used for application porting.

The feedback was great and many questions were asked, showing the increasing interest in GridWay and Grid Technology in general.

Entrance of the CERN Training Centre

José Luis Vázquez-Poletti

During the last two days, Eduardo Huedo and I attended the EGEE III NA4 All Hands Meeting at Orsay, France.

This was a kind of Kick-off Meeting, as different workplans for the NA4 Activity (Application Porting) within the EGEE III Project were defined for the next two years. In particular, our participation is divided in two main tasks:

• Application Porting Support: To help the newcomers to port their applications onto the Grid. Our vast experience achieved with the GridWay Metascheduler will help us in our commitment.
• Regional Coordination/Support: To coordinate our Federation’s research groups/infrastructures in their path to application porting by providing them guidelines, advice and acting as an interface between them. After all these years of conferences and meetings, I’m sure we know mostly everybody and consequently we’ll be able to provide them the best support.

So, EGEE III is here and there’s much to do!

Minutes before the beginning of the meeting

J.L. Vázquez-Poletti

Cheers from the charming city of Lyon, where this year’s edition of the IEEE CCGrid conference does take place. Luis González and me are representing our Research Group in this event which acts as a debate forum between Cluster Computing and Grid Computing experts.

Many personalities, friends of our Group, are attending CCGrid: Rajkumar Buyya (with the GridBus Team), Christophe Blanchet, Omer F. Rana, Rosa M. Badía, …

Luis is performing a presentation about the RESERVOIR project. On the other hand, I’m presenting results of optimizing a bioinformatic workflow that is executed on the Grid, in order to gain efficiency.

The main feeling we have is that Cloud Computing is irrupting in the area, creating much expectation, not only at coffee breaks, but also at the sessions. From the many conversations I held with several participants, I understood that it is happening the same as when the CC (Cluster Computing) Conference turned to CCGrid some years ago. Probably will this conference change name again to assimilate the Cloud concept?

CCGrid 2008 Welcome Cocktail at the Lyon’s City Hall

José Luis Vázquez-Poletti

The First Spanish E-Science Network Meeting, involving up to 68 institutions (Universities, Research and Supercomputation Centers) and organized by the UPV, took place last 21st and 22nd February at our Faculty.

But, What’s E-Science? E-Science can be defined as the “Set of scientific activities employing Internet accessible distributed resources”. In order to enable these distributed resources, four interest areas were defined for coordinating efforts: Supercomputation, Grid Infrastructure, Grid Middleware and Applications. Of course, these areas are not independent and while being developed, there must be a correlation between them.

Many expectations surround this initiative as it is the result of past tentatives, that can’t be said they were a failure as they settled up the base for this Network. In fact, people (over 116 participants) came willing to collaborate and to expand the actual scientific landscape, proposing new ideas and supporting existing ones.

There’s a long way ahead, but we are full of energy and synergy…

Jose Luis Vázquez-Poletti