From bche at redhat.com Wed May 28 14:26:35 2008 From: bche at redhat.com (Bryan Che) Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 10:26:35 -0400 Subject: [Fedora-nightlife-list] Re: new list of names for fedora grid project In-Reply-To: <604aa7910805271547s355f1e6n953db0ff1a0e734c@mail.gmail.com> References: <4829D436.1000703@redhat.com> <483C7824.8010301@redhat.com> <604aa7910805271547s355f1e6n953db0ff1a0e734c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <483D6B9B.1030102@redhat.com> 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 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 at redhat.com > http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board From bche at redhat.com Wed May 28 15:55:50 2008 From: bche at redhat.com (Bryan Che) Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 11:55:50 -0400 Subject: [Fedora-nightlife-list] Introduction to Fedora Nightlife Message-ID: <483D8086.1060808@redhat.com> 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 From jspaleta at gmail.com Thu May 29 16:46:33 2008 From: jspaleta at gmail.com (Jeff Spaleta) Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 08:46:33 -0800 Subject: [Fedora-nightlife-list] A larger goal for nightlife Message-ID: <604aa7910805290946r11173351y5e3717e37a8cb7a0@mail.gmail.com> 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 From renato at acis.ufl.edu Thu May 29 17:20:46 2008 From: renato at acis.ufl.edu (Renato Figueiredo) Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 13:20:46 -0400 Subject: [Fedora-nightlife-list] NAT traversal Message-ID: <68453d1e0805291020p7f1801ccgb60633fc4c5f090b@mail.gmail.com> 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bche at redhat.com Fri May 30 13:49:47 2008 From: bche at redhat.com (Bryan Che) Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 09:49:47 -0400 Subject: [Fedora-nightlife-list] A larger goal for nightlife In-Reply-To: <604aa7910805290946r11173351y5e3717e37a8cb7a0@mail.gmail.com> References: <604aa7910805290946r11173351y5e3717e37a8cb7a0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <484005FB.6000501@redhat.com> Hi Jeff, thanks for your thoughts. As a side-note, I spent yesterday flying back home and landed to see the blog post I'd written in my hotel room the night before had suddenly picked up a lot of attention. So, sorry for the delayed response. =p I agree that Nightlife should be a vehicle to help advance the use of open tools for scientific research. In fact, I hope that Nightlife impacts the way that lots of different communities can leverage grids in the future. Wikia has talked with some of us at Fedora about leveraging this project to help with their Web crawling, and I think that would be a great use of this resource and in the spirit of Fedora as well. I'm not a member of the scientific research community, so I don't have many answers to your questions. But, I do interact with commercial entities using proprietary grids as part of my day job. And, many of these enterprises would be interested in the work in this area at Nightlife. From my end, I'm happy to push and organize things to keep moving Nightlife ahead. If there are development tasks that need to be done that are generally beneficial, I can help facilitate that. I hope that people with deep knowledge and connections into the various research communities (like you) can help steer this project with expert guidance. Bryan Jeff Spaleta wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Fedora-nightlife-list mailing list > Fedora-nightlife-list at redhat.com > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-nightlife-list From bche at redhat.com Sat May 31 22:49:09 2008 From: bche at redhat.com (Bryan Che) Date: Sat, 31 May 2008 18:49:09 -0400 Subject: [Fedora-nightlife-list] nightlife wiki Message-ID: <4841D5E5.1090606@redhat.com> Hi, I've started creating a new Fedora Nightlife Wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Nightlife Bryan -- Bryan Che Red Hat, Inc. 10 Technology Park Dr Westford, MA 01886 978-392-3107 bche at redhat.com