The submission deadline for the Eurosys Doctoral Workshop is the 14th of February 2010. The workshop is co-located with Eurosys in Paris.

The web page is at http://research.microsoft.com/~risaacs/eurosys10dw.html

Here is a brief description from the organizers:

"The doctoral workshop, which will take place on the day before the main EuroSys 2010 program, will provide a forum for PhD students to present their work and receive constructive feedback from experts in the field as well as from peers. Technical presentations will be augmented with general advice and discussions about getting a PhD, doing research, and post-doctoral careers. We invite applications from PhD students at any stage of their doctoral studies, and plan to have about 30 attendees."

• Improved installer with a new xosautoconfig tool to greatly simply and automate installation of XtreemOS instances.

• A number of high impact bug fixes, along with work on stability and correctness.
• XtreemFS 1.2, which has a number of new features along with enhanced performance and stability
• XtreemOS MD (Mobile Device) - This new version integrates XtreemOS on Internet Tablets, beginning with the Nokia N810. This makes it possible to launch jobs and interact with XtreemOS resources via a special client.
• Virtual Nodes - a framework to provide fault tolerance for grid applications by replicating them over multiple nodes.
• XOSSAGA - a set of technologies to allow you to run SAGA compliant  applications on top of XtreemOS unmodified.

This tutorial presents XtreemOS Grid system from the user point of view. Its goal is to show why XtreemOS is a system of choice for Grid users who want to easily execute their applications while taking advantage of advanced features for job management. We show what can be done with XtreemOS with regards to application execution, how it can be done and how the available features are implemented. Demonstrations will be presented throughout the tutorial.

Target audience: Grid users, Grid application developers, Grid system and middleware designers

Session leaders: Christine Morin (INRIA), Yvon Jégou (INRIA), Toni Cortes (BSC), Michael Schöttner (Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf)

Session agenda

- Overview of XtreemOS
- Dynamic resource discovery for job execution
- Resource management
        - Resource selection
        - Resource reservation
        - Resource (co-)allocation
- Job Management
    - Job control
    - Job dependency management
    - Job monitoring & auditing
    - Support for interactive applications
    - Examples of job execution
        - Workflow
        - MPI applications
- Reliable job execution
    - XtreemOS-GCP checkpointing service for distributed applications
        - Integration of different checkpointer packages
        - Generic callbacks for application-level optimizations
        - Channel checkpointing with heterogenous checkpointer packages
- Executing SAGA applications on XtreemOS

Event date and location

OGF28
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Munich, Germany
March 15-19, 2010

Getting XtreemOS 2.0 RedFlag Asianux Version

The XtreemOS 2.0 RedFlag Asianux Version can be downloaded from the Red Flag website: http://dtoem.redflag-linux.com/hhp/

The source code is available at
https://gforge.inria.fr/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/distribution/packages/asianux/?root=xtreemos

Press release in Chinese

...on Red Flag's website:

http://www.redflag-linux.com/XtreemOS-2-0-Redflag-Asianux.html

In April 2010 XtreemOS will have a half-day tutorial at the EuroSys conference.

We'll present and demonstrate the main features of XtreemOS, reflecting the progress that has been made with the last release.

We are welcoming users and developers of distributed applications, and also Grid system administrators, to participate to this tutorial. The attendees will learn how to use XtreemOS for executing and developing complex applications, for storing distributed data and for managing virtual organizations in a simple way. We hope everybody will enjoy discovering XtreemOS!

The tutorial will be presented by: Corina Stratan (VUA), Massimo Coppola (CNR) and Guillaume Pierre (VUA).

More details on the conference web site:
http://eurosys2010-dev.sigops-france.fr/program.html

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXR0Lm3UVjU

• XtreemFS read-only replication:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0co_-_e0Hq4

  
  

   

XtreemOS exhibited for the 3rd time this year at Supercomputing '09 in Portland, Oregon. Sharing the booth were consortium partners INRIA, CNR, VUA, ZIB and Kerlabs.

During the show, the new version 2.0 of XtreemOS was demoed (along with the latest version of Kerrighed using their cluster in a box). Interest from visitors ranged from university faculty interested in integrating XtreemOS in their teaching to other research institutions wishing to join future development.

Despite the economic crisis, there were not many signs of retrenchment in investment or research in HPC (high performance computing). A number of ambitious future projects were unveiled at Supercomputing, along with record numbers of visitors.

One other highlight from the show was the keynote from former U.S. Vice President AL Gore, who addressed the topic of how supercomputing can be used to harness solutions to global climate change science.

Already, space for SC '10 is nearly sold out, which portends another record breaking exhibition.

• International Science Grid This Week (English): "Announcement - XtreemOS 2.0 Release" - http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1002216
• Linux Today (English): "XtreemOS 2.0 release: a Linux-based Grid Operating System" - http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2009111602335PRHESW
• Linux-Magazine (English): "XtreemOS 2.0 Manages and Mounts in Grid" - http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/XtreemOS-2.0-Manages-and-Mounts-in-Grid/%28kategorie%29/0
• Emergences (newsletter from INRIA Rennes): "XtreemOS publie sa 2.0" - http://emergences.inria.fr/2009emergences/newsletter-n07/L07-XTREEMOS
• Toolinux (French): "XtreemOS 2.0 est arrivé" - http://www.toolinux.com/lininfo/toolinux-information/logiciels/article/xtreemos-2-est-arrive
• linuxfr.org (French): "XtreemOS 2.0 : grille de calcul multi plate-forme sous Linux" - http://linuxfr.org/2009/12/01/26224.html
• Silicon (French): "Un Sytème d'exploitation dédié aux clusters" - http://www.silicon.fr/fr/news/2009/11/24/xtreemos___un_systeme_d_exploitation_linux_dedie_aux_clusters

Ulm University is located in the southern part of Germany. It was founded in 1967 and is therefore a rather young university. Nowadays there are about 7 000 students with main subjects in medicine, natural sciences, mathematics, economics, engineering and computer sciences. The computer science department has about 20 professors doing research and teaching in all major areas of computer science. Ulm University is partner of XtreemOS with the Aspectix Research Team as part of the Institute for Distributed Systems. The team and its 7 researchers are working on multimedia platforms, middleware systems for adaptive applications and fault tolerance.

• Virtual Nodes

The main task of UULM in XtreemOS is the development of a fault tolerance infrastructure called Virtual Nodes that can be used for grid applications but also for XtreemOS-internal services. Virtual Nodes are a framework providing multiple configurable implementations for replication support, e.g., Virtual Nodes provide active and passive replication protocols. The most innovative element of Virtual Nodes is the support of concurrency for replicated services due to different deterministic scheduling algorithms. For adding new replicas a special join protocol was developed that supports consistent state checkpoints even with concurrent service activities. Current work is the integration of Virtual Nodes technology into the XtreemOS job management services. The integration into security services is under consideration.

In cooperation with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA), UULM has contributed to the Distributed Server system that allows clients to use a fixed server address. The corresponding server socket can be moved between different server instances. UULM is working on the integration of Distributed Server technology with Virtual Nodes, which allows clients to remain completely agnostic about replication.

The first XtreemOS summer school took place in Oxford, UK, last September 7-11, 2009.

The presentation slides are now available here (in technical programme).

 In the data management module, the storage system research group is in charge of the algorithm to locate the best replica of a file as well as to decide when and where replicas should be created and/or removed. This mechanism is base on an improved version of the Vivaldi algorithm that places all XtreemOS nodes into a 2D space based on communication latencies.

Poslovna Linux konferenca (Business Linux Conference) is an annual event in Slovenia, focussing on the use of Linux and other open-source software in business environments.  This year  the conference took place in Portorož on the 28th and 29th of September.

XtreemOS was presented by Marjan Šterk and Matej Artač (both from XLAB) as a platform for collaboration both within companies and across company borders. A potential use case in an architectural bureau was used to enumerate the most important features of XtreemOS in businesses: sharing files with XtreemFS, exploiting grid resources for automatic compilation of project documentation, marketing material, animations etc, and use of applications installed on remote computers without the need for local user accounts. A simplified live demonstration of these features was also shown.

The first XtreemOS summit was co-located with Euro-Par 2009 in Delft, The Netherlands.

The objective of this half-day summit was to present the XtreemOS technology with different talks ranging from a general overview to selected topics including security, resource matching, and parallel I/O. After the talks different demonstrations were run to show the benefits of  the XtreemOS system.

The summit concluded with an interesting and fruitful discussion between the audience and the XtreemOS representatives.

XtreemOS summit webpage: here

Thilo Kielmann (VUA) also gave an invited talk at CoreGRID 2009 workshop (in conjunction with EuroPar): "XtreemOS a sound foundation for IaaS and cloud federations"

In addition, John Mehnert-Spahn (UDUS) presented an XtreemOS paper:

- "The Architecture of the XtreemOS Grid Checkpointing Service" by John Mehnert-Spahn, Thomas Ropars, Michael Schoettner and Christine Morin

More about XtreemFS: here