Invitation to Participate PRAGMA Online Seminar "Building the PRAGMA Multi-Cloud"

HKU is an institutional member of PRAGMA (the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly). Recently, apart from building international research collaborations, ITS has also participated in the PRAGMA grid and PRAGMA cloud, contributing some limited resources into the PRAGMA cloud community for pilot testing.

Interested users are invited to join the next PRAGMA Students Online Seminar(Connect URL: http://connect.iu.edu/pragmastudents) on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM HKT (UTC+8), to understand the underlying principles in converting software into application-specific virtual machine images to run in multiple cloud hosting infrastructures. Details of the seminar are as follows:

Abstract: The Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly is a 30+ institution grass roots or bottom’s up experimentation and computing infrastructure. Originally envisioned as a mutli-institutional grid, this persistent environment is evolving to a multi-cloud where the executable is a virtual machine instead of an application executable. With partners at AIST (Japan) and NCHC (Taiwan) we have developed semi-automated techniques to convert application-specific virtual machine images to run in multiple cloud hosting infrastructures, including Amazon EC2. VM’s are uploaded to distributed, strongly authenticated, and replicated storage infrastructure based on gFarm and then copied out and translated to local hosting infrastructure. This talk will describe the process, the challenges such as overlay networking, VM control and a path forward to creating usable infrastructure for small groups of collaborating teams. We will walk through two different use models that operate across different cloud infrastructures to illustrate various components.

Bio: Dr. Papadopoulos received his PhD in 1993 from UC Santa Barbara in Electrical Engineering. He spent 5 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of the the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) development team. He came to UCSD as research professor in computer science in 1998 and still holds and adjunct appointment. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). He is the architect of the Triton resource (tritonresource.sdsc.edu) which is a network, storage and memory rich, mid-scale (3000 core) cluster that is also an ongoing experiment in economic sustainability for campus-scale computing. In addition to duties at SDSC, his research interests revolve around distributed, clustered, and cloud-based systems and how they can be used more effectively in an expanding bandwidth-rich environment. Dr. Papadopoulos is a key investigator for key research projects at UCSD including the The National Biomedical Computation Resource(NBCR) and the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middlware Assembly (PRAGMA) He is well known for leading the development of the open-source, NSF-funded Rocks Cluster toolkit (OCI-0721623), which has installed base of 1000s of clusters. Rocks (www.rocksclusters.org) is used for both research and production systems with scalability to 1000s of nodes. Our work in Rocks focuses on developing practical, scalable, and robust virtual machine authoring and implementation of hybrid clusters that consist of both real and virtual hardware. More recently, we have demonstrated seamlessly extending the number of nodes in a local cluster with additional virtualized resources housed on campus clouds and/or in Amazon EC2.

About PRAGMA and PRAGMA Students

The Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) is a robust, international network of research scientists and engineers from more than 30 institutions who address application driven questions through cyberinfrastructure development. PRAGMA’s student members imbue the program with both new ideas and the energy and excitement to advance projects. The PRAGMA Students is a students organization of PRAGMA led by a steering committee formed by students from PRAGMA member institutions. It's current activities includes but not limited to, organizing student workshops and poster sessions as part of the bi-annual PRAGMA workshops, and hosting online seminar for the PRAGMA community.

How to Connect
We will be using Adobe Connect to host the meeting. Please test your computers for compatibility via the following link. If the test passes through steps 1-3, then you will be able to attend the meeting. Step 4 (plugin installation) works with recent update of Mozilla Firefox , Safari and IE 9. But there are some known incompatibilities with recent versions of Google Chrome. If the test passes through step 3, you are good to attend as audience. Only the presenter needs to install the plugin to share the screen.

Test link: http://arcps.adobeconnect.com/common/help/en/support/meeting_test.htm
More info: https://seminars.adobeconnect.com/_a227210/vqs-participatemeeting/