The report from the two workshops that Jonathan Cummings, Tom Finhiolt, Carl Kesselman, Katherine Lawrence, and I ran (with much help from Diana Rhoten) on "Building Effective Virtual Organizations" is now available on the BEVO website. The title is "Beyond Being There: A Blueprint for Advancing the Design, Development, and Evaluation of Virtual Organizations"--and that is what the report provides. We lead off with the delightful quote from Arthur Mee, writing in the Strand Magazine ...

I always wondered what my physicist friends at CERN were really up to. Now all is explained in this amusing video. These beautiful pictures are also worth a look.

Alina Bejan just posted the following announcement:MidWest Grid School (MWGS'08) -- Call for Participation Please JOIN US for an exciting 3-day course in large-scale and high-performance grid computing to take place Sep 17-19, 2008, at University of Chicago, Chicago IL. The Open Science Grid (OSG), a major national grid infrastructure, provides scientists with more than 70 production sites offering over 20,000 CPUs and 4 Petabytes of storage to advance their research. This organization includes members ...

I was invited to speak at the University of Chicago's Physics Colloquium. I foolishly agreed and then had to work out what I could possibly say that would be of interest to physicists. I figured that a talk on distributed computing wouldn't be too interesting. Instead, I gave a more general talk with the grandiose title "Computation and Knowledge":I speak to the question of how computation can contribute to the generation of new knowledge by ...

We all know that the US patent system has its weaknesses: that every now and then, people get granted patents for things that are either well known or obvious. This probably explains why people keep filing dumb patents: you never know when you might hit the jackpot. In any case, here's a doozy: following on some 40 or more years of distributed computing research, and 15+ years of commercial and academic grid computing, IBM has ...

I gave a brief talk at HPC 2009 in Cetraro, Italy, on Grid Projects in the US. I tried to explain what I see as three complementary sets of activities: Resource providers (RPs) focus on providing substantial communities with on-demand access to computing and storage. TeraGrid, Open Science Grid, campus grids, and the likes of Amazon EC2 and S3 fit in this space. Service providers (SPs) use either dedicated resources or RP-provided resources to provide ...

Tim Freeman writes about how to create one click clusters using the Globus workspace service. Univa UD describes how to create UniCluster clusters on EC2. We wrote a paper about on-demand clusters a while back. It's how all clusters should be created :)

Ioan Raicu, Yong Zhao, and I are running a Workshop on Many Tasks Computing on Grids and Supercomputers (MTAGS) at SC'08 (Austin, Texas, November 17, 2008). The deadline for submissions is August 15. Our goal in convening this workshop is to encourage discussion among those interested in escaping the "SPMD rut" that characterizes much work in parallel, if not grid, computing. We believe that new applications and more powerful computers are spurring increased interest in ...

iGSTW has a nice article on the marvel that is GridFTP (and a nice photo of Raj Kettimuthu). The article says "these features will be in GT4.2, to be released in summer 2008." GT4.2 was released on July 2.

I spent yesterday visiting the University of Notre Dame. (Fortunately, as it was Earth Day, I discovered I could take to train from Chicago.) I had interesting conversations with my host Doug Thain and many other talented faculty, and left impressed with the quality of the department. I'll mention one fun thing I learned there: I happened to ask Paul Brenner from their Center for Research Computing whether they are incentivizing faculty to centralize research ...

Way before clouds were popular (remember then?) my colleagues Kate Keahey and Tim Freeman started work on their workspace service, a system for on-demand creation and management of virtual machines on remote computing systems. They now have an implementation that interfaces both to clusters running conventional schedulers and to Amazon EC2. It's distributed as part of the Globus software, or you can download it separately. Kate and Tim have recently established a deployment of the ...

Globus has been selected as a mentor organization for the 2008 Google Summer of Code. This means that if you are a talented student programmer, you can sign up to work on a project. You get a modest amount of fortune (US$4500) and some degree of fame (TBD), and Globus gets a nice open source code contribution. We have a set of project ideas online, but if you think of something else that should be ...