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Our Blogs Open Sauce Linux: for all things great and small | Linux: for all things great and small |
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| Open Sauce - Linux Blog | |
| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 18 November 2008 | |
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Page 5 of 6 Another area to which VPAC contributes is grid computing. The grid project has now become the Australia Research Collaboration Project but it started off as the Apac grid project. Featured Whitepaper
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"When we talk about grids, we are talking about software that lets you send jobs to clusters around the country without necessarily knowing the internals of the clusters," explains Samuel. "So it's a standardised interface that talks to clusters remotely. "The people here who are funded through that programme do a lot of work on that software, both getting it working and they also use a lot of virtualisation using Xen virtual machines. They build virtual machines for a whole heap of this grid middleware called Globus. It's an open source project licensed under the Apache public license." He says VPAC has also done its share of development. "We have developed software to make life easier for grid users. Most of our users are scientists and they are not particularly comfortable using the command line. A lot of grid stuff depends on people using the command line to create certificates and things like that. So we developed some Java applications - one thats let them crest certificates, get them approved, and another one that lets them submit jobs easily to the right sites. Both of those are open sourced under the Apache licence." For all that it does, VPAC is quite low-profile. It's one of the problems that if you are really good as an infrastructure provider nobody notices," says Bannon. "The best thing you can be as an infrastructure provider is to be unnoticed. That would mean that you are doing a really good job. We get our jollies when our scientists get good publications and our universities are happy with the results that come out. For us, that's our achievement." Appleby says there is a downside to working efficiently sight unseen. "A lot of people under-estimate the difficulty of running a Linux cluster. We've seen state departments massively under-estimate the difficulty, we've seen individual researchers and people waste a large amount of time just going off and buying a cluster and just assuming that they can dump it in the back of a broom closet somewhere and run it. And six months later they find that it's not that easy." He adds: "Nobody in metro Melbourne would assume that I don't need to be connected to the power, water or electricity grid, I'll do it all on my own and generate electricity myself. But there are people who assume, I'll just go out to Dick Smith's, buy a big cluster and shove it in and put Linux on top of it, it can't be that hard. But it is." Finding workers who are suitable for the organisation is difficult. "The truth of the matter is there is no formal training for this area," says Bannon. "We look for people who have an interest in Linux, and a passion for open source software. They are the ones who are going to grow into the kind of people we want. We have long accepted that we have to take relatively junior people and train them up. We have got some people who have been here for a long time and who are incredibly valuable people in this field." |
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