February 2012 - wg-all - lists.ogf.org

New document published: Distributed Resource Management Application API Version 2
by Greg Newby 12 Dec '12

12 Dec '12

OGF Community: A new document has been published in the OGF series. All OGF documents (including some that are open for public comment!) may be found here: http://www.ogf.org/gf/docs/ * GFD-R.194 "Distributed Resource Management Application API Version 2 (DRMAA)"[Obsoletes GFD.22, GFD.130 and GFD.133]. Via DRMAA-WG. P. Tröger, R. Brost, D. Gruber, M. Mamoński, D. Templeton Abstract: This document describes the Distributed Resource Management Application API Version 2 (DRMAA). It defines a generalized API to Distributed Resource Management (DRM) systems in order to facilitate the development of portable application programs and high-level libraries. The intended audience for this specification are DRMAA language binding designers, DRM system vendors, high-level API designers and meta-scheduler architects. Application developers are expected to rely on product-specific documentation for the DRMAA API implementation in their particular DRM system. -- Greg Newby, OGF Editor Dr. Gregory Newby, Director of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center Univ of Alaska Fairbanks-909 Koyukuk Dr-PO Box 756020-Fairbanks-AK 99775-6020 e: gbnewby AT alaska.edu v: 907-450-8663 f: 907-450-8603 w: www.arsc.edu/~newby

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Register Now for OGF34!
by Alan Sill 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

Reminder: regular registration ends March 9 for OGF 34 in Oxford, UK! * A full schedule is now posted at http://www.ogf.org/OGF34/schedule * The rates for regular full and on-site registration are as below. Register now to get the best rate! Full Registration (February 23 - March 9, 2012) Member Fee Non-Member Fee Full Conference $495 $595 One Day $245 $295 Student $325 $325 On-Site Registration (March 10 - March 15, 2012) Member Fee Non-Member Fee Full Conference $595 $695 One Day $295 $345 Student $375 $375 Note that all costs are in US Dollars. Further information is available at the following link: http://www.ogf.org/OGF34/registration.php Preview news: OGF 35 is also now confirmed to be co-located with the HPDC conference 2012 in Delft. Bookmark http://www.ogf.org/OGF35/ and keep an eye out for session requests and proposals to be posted soon! Alan Sill Senior Scientist, High Performance Computing Center Adjunct Professor of Physics, TTU Vice President of Standards, Open Grid Forum

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Update: Call for Abstracts: Workshop on Science Applications and Infrastructure in Clouds and Grids, Oxford, UK, March 15-16 2012
by Sill, Alan 09 Feb '12

09 Feb '12

Update: Abstract submission form and link to registration site now available. Dear colleagues, On behalf of the organizing committee, I would like to call your attention to the following workshop to be held in conjunction with the Open Grid Forum OGF 34 meeting. We invite your contributions in the form of a brief abstract in response to the questions that form the focus of the workshop, as described below. All submissions will be considered; a wide variety of submissions is recruited. Your cooperation in circulating this call to your colleagues would be appreciated. Please respond or direct any questions to the primary workshop organizer, Dr. Jens Jensen of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, by e-mail at jens.jensen(a)stfc.ac.uk or by the registration form that is now available at the workshop site. Workshop on Science Applications and Infrastructure in Clouds and Grids http://www.ogf.org/SAICG Oxford, UK March 15-16, 2012 Science in general continues to make increasing use of advanced computing methods to process and visualize data, to perform simulations for comparison with expensive or difficult experiments, to extend the reach of theory beyond accessible experimental ranges, and to mine results from large collections of complex data. The "Science Applications and Infrastructure in Clouds and Grids" workshop to be held in conjunction with Open Grid Forum's OGF 34 meetingwill address many of these important topics. Cyberinfrastructures and e-infrastructures are being used to carry out intensive computations and data processing in ways that support individual researchers, and also in ways that enable collaborations between researchers. In addition to traditional grid computing methods, clouds are increasingly being used to broaden and extend the range of tools used to meet demands for computing and data services. Previous workshops in this series, as described below, have been used to explore the high-performance range of cloud and grid applications and to discuss science agency uses of clouds and grids. The purpose of this workshop is to investigate cloud and grid framework software efforts and applications in greater detail, with focus on the following questions: • What are the relative benefits of cloud vs. grid models? • Are clouds and grids best used in conjunction with each other, or on their own? • What sort of scientific applications are better suited to each model? Which run better on grids, and which on clouds? Are some areas of research better suited to each model than others? • How does the difference between cost and support personnel considerations affect research, planning, and funding? • How do trust and security issues and other constraints affect the uptake of cloud resources? • What is missing at the cyber/einfrastructure layers, in the applications and supporting libraries, or in the funding models to improve the uptake of cloud resources? • What is the role of private, community, hybrid and/or commercial cloud models in building frameworks to support scientific research? • How can scientific research best make use of the work coming out of the existing cloud projects and related activities? What new projects along these lines should be pursued? • What are the roles of standards bodies and interoperation projects in improving the uptake of research in the clouds? Can we improve on the situation? We invite prospective participants to submit brief abstracts, on the order of one paragraph, on any of the related topics from the above list to the workshop organizers, and to request special topics for consideration if so inclined. We are also interested in presentations on forefront applications and/or framework infrastructures useful in clouds and grids in support of science application areas. These will be considered for acceptance for a short (order 20 to 30 minute) presentation at the workshop, to be followed up by an optional short position paper to be published in the workshop report. This workshop is a follow-on in the series started by two previous workshops on High Performance Applications of Cloud and Grid Tools held in April, 2011 and Science Agency Uses of Clouds and Grids held July, 2011. Deadline for submission of abstracts is Feb 24, 2012. Logistics: The workshop will be free to attend but we ask you to register beforehand. It is expected that the workshop day will be scheduled for Thursday March 15, possibly extending to the morning of Friday 16th, depending on the number and quality of submissions. Sponsors: Funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), supported by the e-Research centre at the University of Oxford (OeRC), and organised by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). We acknowledge the role of the US Department of Energy Office for Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Internet2 and the SIENA project in supporting previous workshops in this series. OGFSM, Open Grid ForumSM, Grid ForumSM, and the OGF Logo are trademarks of OGF.

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Call for Abstracts: Workshop on Science Applications and Infrastructure in Clouds and Grids, Oxford, UK, March 15-16 2012
by Alan Sill 07 Feb '12

07 Feb '12

Dear colleagues, On behalf of the organizing committee, I would like to call your attention to the following workshop to be held in conjunction with the Open Grid Forum OGF 34 meeting. We invite your contributions in the form of a brief abstract in response to the questions that form the focus of the workshop, as described below. All submissions will be considered; a wide variety of submissions is recruited. Your cooperation in circulating this call to your colleagues would be appreciated. Please respond or direct any questions to the primary workshop organizer, Dr. Jens Jensen of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, by e-mail at jens.jensen(a)stfc.ac.uk or by the registration form that should be available at the workshop site shortly. Workshop on Science Applications and Infrastructure in Clouds and Grids http://www.ogf.org/SAICG Oxford, UK March 15-16, 2012 Science in general continues to make increasing use of advanced computing methods to process and visualize data, to perform simulations for comparison with expensive or difficult experiments, to extend the reach of theory beyond accessible experimental ranges, and to mine results from large collections of complex data. The "Science Applications and Infrastructure in Clouds and Grids" workshop to be held in conjunction with Open Grid Forum's OGF 34 meetingwill address many of these important topics. Cyberinfrastructures and e-infrastructures are being used to carry out intensive computations and data processing in ways that support individual researchers, and also in ways that enable collaborations between researchers. In addition to traditional grid computing methods, clouds are increasingly being used to broaden and extend the range of tools used to meet demands for computing and data services. Previous workshops in this series, as described below, have been used to explore the high-performance range of cloud and grid applications and to discuss science agency uses of clouds and grids. The purpose of this workshop is to investigate cloud and grid framework software efforts and applications in greater detail, with focus on the following questions: • What are the relative benefits of cloud vs. grid models? • Are clouds and grids best used in conjunction with each other, or on their own? • What sort of scientific applications are better suited to each model? Which run better on grids, and which on clouds? Are some areas of research better suited to each model than others? • How does the difference between cost and support personnel considerations affect research, planning, and funding? • How do trust and security issues and other constraints affect the uptake of cloud resources? • What is missing at the cyber/einfrastructure layers, in the applications and supporting libraries, or in the funding models to improve the uptake of cloud resources? • What is the role of private, community, hybrid and/or commercial cloud models in building frameworks to support scientific research? • How can scientific research best make use of the work coming out of the existing cloud projects and related activities? What new projects along these lines should be pursued? • What are the roles of standards bodies and interoperation projects in improving the uptake of research in the clouds? Can we improve on the situation? We invite prospective participants to submit brief abstracts, on the order of one paragraph, on any of the related topics from the above list to the workshop organizers, and to request special topics for consideration if so inclined. We are also interested in presentations on forefront applications and/or framework infrastructures useful in clouds and grids in support of science application areas. These will be considered for acceptance for a short (order 20 to 30 minute) presentation at the workshop, to be followed up by an optional short position paper to be published in the workshop report. This workshop is a follow-on in the series started by two previous workshops on High Performance Applications of Cloud and Grid Tools held in April, 2011 and Science Agency Uses of Clouds and Grids held July, 2011. Deadline for submission of abstracts is Feb 24, 2012. Logistics: The workshop will be free to attend but we ask you to register beforehand. It is expected that the workshop day will be scheduled for Thursday March 15, possibly extending to the morning of Friday 16th, depending on the number and quality of submissions. Sponsors: Funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), supported by the e-Research centre at the University of Oxford (OeRC), and organised by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). We acknowledge the role of the US Department of Energy Office for Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Internet2 and the SIENA project in supporting previous workshops in this series. OGFSM, Open Grid ForumSM, Grid ForumSM, and the OGF Logo are trademarks of OGF.

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Certificate updates for forge.ogf.org and www.ogf.org
by Alan Sill 04 Feb '12

04 Feb '12

Dear OGF colleagues, You may or may not have noticed, but we have put in new high-grade commercial certificates from DigiCert to handle the https portions of access to the forge and www portions of the Open Grid Forum web presence. Using secure access allows us to protect your login credentials when you access the user account-protected portions of our collaborative tools. It also allows you to be sure you are fetching material from our site, and not an impostor, when you access our code repositories and other download features, helping to prevent the potential for OGF features to become an inadvertent vector for transmission of malware or infected code. The web site certificates should resolve and validate in all modern browsers. If you are curious, you can click on the certificate icon in the lower right-hand corner of any protected pages to see the steps used to verify us. This means that you can delete any previously saved self-signed certificates for OGF if you want to (although leaving them in should be harmless). We are working on documenting needed steps for allowing you to trust the new certificates in command-line and graphical code client tools for accessing the code repositories. These vary by client, and some have various settings for enabling automatic validation via the usual "trusted CA" stores. For now, until we have all of the details to share with you, there is an easy way to decide whether to add the site certificate for GridForge to your locally trusted list: simply visit https://forge.org.org in your browser and use your browser's inspection tools - typically accessed by clicking on the icon that indicates a trusted https site - to inspect the certificate and take note of its fingerprint. This should match the one being presented when you access the repository. An example for command-line subversion access is given at the end of this message. (It is possible to avoid this message by making certain settings in your ~/.subversion/servers file, but this illustrates nicely how to check a fingerprint.) We hope this helps to improve the security of your access to the OGF tools. As a reminder, we are looking for volunteers to work with those who have stepped forward so far to join an effort to improve the range and type of tools used to support the IT needs of the OGF community. If you are interested in helping, please send a message to Joel Replogle, myself or Andre Merzky, who is leading this effort. Thanks to DigiCert for providing the new EV certs, and we welcome them to the Silver sponsorship level for OGF. Alan Alan Sill, Ph.D Senior Scientist, High Performance Computing Center Adjunct Professor of Physics, TTU Vice President of Standards, Open Grid Forum ==================================================================== : Alan Sill, Texas Tech University Office: Drane 162, MS 4-1167 : : e-mail: Alan.Sill(a)ttu.edu ph. 806-834-5940 fax 806-834-4358 : ==================================================================== Example with svn command line: $ svn checkout --username (your-user-name-here) https://forge.ogf.org/svn/repos/(your-work-group-here) Error validating server certificate for 'https://forge.ogf.org:443': - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the fingerprint to validate the certificate manually! Certificate information: - Hostname: forge.ogf.org - Valid: from Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT until Thu, 06 Feb 2014 18:00:00 GMT - Issuer: www.digicert.com, DigiCert Inc, US - Fingerprint: (It should put out a fingerprint here.) (R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently? (Compare the fingerprint in the output to the one listed for SHA1 in the OGF GridForge certificate. If they match, it should be OK to accept the certificate in your client.)

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