NAT traversal
by Renato Figueiredo
It's great to see this project getting off the ground!
Our group is very interested in this idea. We have been working with
wide-area VM appliance Condor pools for a couple of years and have developed
a peer-to-peer virtual network (IP-over-P2P, or IPOP) that supports
decentralized NAT traversal with techniques including hole-punching and
proxying. We've found this to be very useful to facilitate the deployment of
ad-hoc wide-area Condor pools/flocks where nodes are increasingly behind
NATs. The IPOP code is also open source and user level (though it currently
uses a tap device), so I thought this would be of interest to the list. Here
are some pointers for more information (and software):
http://grid-appliance.org
http://ipop-project.org
We're starting a collaboration with the Condor group on a particular
application of this virtual infrastructure for computer architecture
simulation (http://archer-project.org); hopefully sharing our experience
with this system can benefit nightlife and vice-versa.
Bests,
--rf
--
Dr. Renato J. Figueiredo
Associate Professor
ACIS Lab / Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Florida
http://byron.acis.ufl.edu
ph: 352-392-6430
15 years, 10 months
A larger goal for nightlife
by Jef Spaleta
Good Alaskan Morning,
As a Board member, since the intent of creating the Fedora Grid
project was announced, I've been trying to get an idea of what sort of
open community we can build around it and its concepts. Unlike most
services inside Fedora, the Nightlife grid is not primarily aimed at
Fedora users and contributors, its really aimed at researchers who
have computationally intensive projects to solve. Nightlife turns
Fedora users into resources for researchers. The hard problem is
going to be encouraging researchers who are doing scientific
calculations, who by and large are not Fedora contributors, to place
compatible projects on the grid. Getting Fedora users to run clients
will be far easier a problem to solve in comparison.
So its time for me to ask the really hard question.... what's in it
for the researchers? I've been asking around a little and you have a
fundamental problem. In my very unscientific estimation, small and
mid-scale scientifiic research numerics is dominated by proprietary
tools such as MATLAB and IDL. I'm talking about processes that are
easily divided up for multi-processor calculation, like particle in a
cell simulations, or parameter studies. There's a lot of code hand
built code out there, in a questionably licensed state, which was
never really meant to be distributed or used by other people. A lot
of that code is not something we can run natively on a Fedora system,
nor could we even distribute the tools. This is a problem.
Beyond that, once you get into massively parallelized simulations,
codes still may require proprietary libraries like NAG, or even
proprietary compiler chains. These are the sorts of codes which
expect to be run on large highly parallel cluster. and use openmpi or
some other technology to negotiate disturbingly large matrix inversion
calculations. However, these sorts of codes are more likely to be
organized into an active upstream project with acceptable licensing
for easy distribution and use by researchers. When national labs or
universities invest in HPC linux clusters, these are the sorts of
codes they do it for. I'm not sure these sorts of things are easily
griddable for NIghtlife. And even if they are, the upstream
developers would need to make the invest to make sure these simulation
codebases run on Fedora. The codebases maybe licensed openly, but
they may require proprietary dependencies to fully function. This is a
problem.
So where does that leave us? I think a lot of work will have to be
done to find the first few compelling research project which would be
compatible with Fedora Nightlife. Even if there is a need for spare
Fedora CPU cycles, I'm not sure the need can be met using available
open technology without researchers doing a significantly re-tooling.
So why should researchers re-tool? As a researcher myself, I know my
personal answer to the question. I'm slowly re-tooling the analysis
I do away from the existing trove of IDL routines to python. I could
have just bought another IDL license and used the available storehouse
of IDL tools built up already over the last 10 years before I joined
this project. And if I were compelled to by my employeer I would be
using the IDL. What is going to be 'enough' enticement to compel a
large number of researchers to start doing something similar? Or
better yet, to compel their project or institutional management to
re-tool away from proprietary solutions? I'm not sure the scientific
funding structures encourage individual researchers seek open
solutions as strongly as they could. Will the Nightlife grid itself
be an important enough resource to encourage that re-tooling? I'm not
sure. Its novel, and its cool.. but I'm just not sure there is a pent
up need for spare CPU cycles so severe in the academic research
community that it would cause a migration from proprietary tools.
But I think the Niightlife grid can be a piece of a larger Fedora
effort to establish standard open HPC software stack that encompasses
highly distributed community grid which Nightlife aims to be, but also
deeply parallel, tightly networked clusters which researchers have
access to as part of their grant funding either at national lab
facilities or locally at home institutions. With a fully open HPC
framework that we can ship in Fedora and thus EPEL/RHEL, we then give
simulation codebase projects something to target as a platform. We
might even be able to encourage institutional big iron to participate
as Nightlife nodes by running the open HPC stack that Nightlife is a
part of.
So that's the challenge. For Nightlife to be compelling as a service
to researchers, I think 'we' have to re-invent Fedora as a platform
for scientific HPC development which can compete with the likes of
MATLAB and IDL...even in environments which have institutional
site-licenses for this proprietary tools. We have to make Fedora
compelling for HPC generally. How do we do that? I have no idea.
I'm going to be trying to find the people who do have ideas, the
ability, and the motivation to see things changed. I will be pointing
HPC stakeholders to this list to have the discussion. All I have is
questions, questions like these:
What should Fedora provide as an open functional HPC stack?
Could such open HPC stack be configured out of the box for common usage cases?
What large existing scientific simulation projects are candidates for
inclusion into Fedora?
Are those upstream project developers interested in seeing their
framework included in Fedora?
Can those codebase be adapted to be run on a highly distributed grid
such as Nightlife?
Is it possible for institutional clusters to join the Nightlife grid
as clients?
Why would institutional clusters choos to join the grid?
-jef
15 years, 11 months
Introduction to Fedora Nightlife
by Bryan Che
Fedora Nightlife is a new project for creating a Fedora community grid.
People will be able to donate idle capacity from their own computers
to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially
beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large
amounts of computing power. Given the large number of Fedora users, I
hope that we will eventually be able to build a community grid of over a
million nodes at Fedora. This will be a great example of the power of
the Fedora community, give people new and meaningful ways to contribute
to Fedora, advance the development of large-scale grid software, and
lead to real benefits for the world.
Fedora Nightlife will leverage the Condor project, which was
(http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/) created and hosted by the University of
Wisconsin Madison, for scheduling and harnessing donated computing
power. Last year, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin signed a
strategic partnership around Condor. Part of this partnership entailed
releasing Condor's source code under an OSI-approved open source
license. As a result, we now have Condor packaged at Fedora, and
upstream development continues to happen at the University of Wisconsin
repository in an open manner.
Some of the immediate next steps for Fedora Nightlife are:
-create a Wiki page for this project
-get a Condor scheduler hosted at Fedora up and running
-work out what are the requirements for a project to be able to run on
Fedora Nightlife (e.g. its software must be open source, it must be
safe, it should have some kind of open policy around its results, etc)
We've already started working on getting a scheduler up and running. I
should have a wiki setup relatively soon so that we can start mapping
out more plans there.
Then, we can focus on growing the Nightlife community of projects and
solicit Fedora users to donate capacity. Hopefully, enabling donation
of compute power to Nightlife can eventually become a first-boot option
for Fedora installs.
I welcome everyone to contribute to and participate in the Fedora
Nightlife project!
Bryan
15 years, 11 months
Re: new list of names for fedora grid project
by Bryan Che
I'd welcome HPC discussions on those lists--it would be good for people
involved with the project to see what people focused on HPC want.
I've created the mailing lists:
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-nightlife-list
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-nightlife-devel-list
Bryan
Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 1:07 PM, Bryan Che <bche(a)redhat.com> wrote:
>> Hi, after getting updated votes and doing a trademark search, it appears
>> that "Fedora Nightlife" is the new name for our community grid project.
>> I'll start getting the infrastructure (mailing lists, web pages) setup for
>> this.
>
> Will the lists be wide enough to be able to use them for HPC issues generally?
> I think the grid project is going to be an opening for a discussion to
> get stakeholders talking about a fully open HPC stack framework. I
> just need to know if the grid discussion lists will be wide enough to
> encompass that. If it is, I can start driving external HPC people
> towards the grid lists.
>
> -jef
>
> _______________________________________________
> fedora-advisory-board mailing list
> fedora-advisory-board(a)redhat.com
> http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
15 years, 11 months