Science Clouds or It Takes a Village to Give a Talk on Cloud Computing

Wednesday July 24, 2013 Kate Keahey, David Lifka, Manish Parashar, Warren Smith, Carol Song, and Shaowen Wang facilitated a Birds of a Feather at XSEDE13 entitled Science Clouds or It Takes a Village to Give a Talk on Cloud Computing.

"The objective of this BOF is to bring together a community of current and prospective XSEDE cloud users and both provide and solicit information on scientific cloud use. We will describe existing cloud offerings in academic space, such as FutureGrid and Red Cloud, describe examples of successful scientific use and discuss with the participants the challenges the community faces when accessing clouds and ways of addressing them, as part of an “approach clinic”. We will then brainstorm ideas on approaches, tools and initiatives that could make the current use of cloud easier and how to evaluate the potential of infrastructure clouds in the context of specific application groups."

For a more complete description of the BOF, please view the XSEDE13 schedule.

Download the slides for the BOF here. [PPTX]

HOW TO MAKE A MOOC

FutureGrid community members are invited to create MOOC resources related to the work they are developing through their use of FutureGrid. 

For information on how to create a FutureGrid MOOC, please visit the How To Make A MOOC page:  https://portal.futuregrid.org/mooc

FutureGrid XSEDE13 Presentations highlight MOOCs

Details about how MOOC's are opening up exciting opportunities for education and training in HPC, Grid, and Cloud computing can be found in these two presentations delivered on July 24, 2013 at XSEDE13, San Diego, CA:

Remarks on MOOC's: Open Grid Forum BOF [PTTX] - Geoffrey Fox

FutureGrid UAB Meeting [PTTX] - Gregor von Laszewski and Geoffrey Fox

FutureGrid Upgrades Support of Educational Use

As part of an ongoing commitment to education FutureGrid announces prototypes of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) designed for use in class or as out of class supplemental material for courses covering HPC, Grid, and Cloud Computing.    

Currently two FutureGrid MOOCs are available.

The Intro to FutureGrid MOOC, divided into six units, covers core capabilities: setting up a portal account and project; using non virtualized HPC nodes; and explores two approaches to virtual machines: using OpenStack Grizzly release and using the Eucalyptus system.  Instructors for the Intro to FutureGrid MOOC are FutureGrid PI Geoffrey Fox and FutureGrid Software Architect Gregor von Laszewski.

In addition FutureGrid MOOCs will cover advanced topics.  We begin with FutureGrid TEOS Team Leader Renato J. Figueiredo's IP-over-P2P (IPOP) MOOC: Network Virtualization in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud Computing.   The IPOP MOOC has twelve units of instruction.  Students who take this MOOC will learn about the role of virtual networks in IaaS, the key abstractions and techniques used to implement them, challenges and techniques applied to network virtualization across multiple IaaS clouds, and will learn about the architecture and usage of the open-source IPOP virtual network through hands-on exercises.

Further MOOC components are under development and will be available in the coming months.  Comments and suggestions are welcome.  

FutureGrid community members are invited to create MOOC resources related to the work they are developing through their use of FutureGrid. For information on how to create a FutureGrid MOOC, please visit https://portal.futuregrid.org/mooc

The FutureGrid MOOCs are available at:  https://fgmoocs.appspot.com

Science Clouds BOF at XSEDE 13

FutureGrid invites you to engage in the Science Clouds Birds of a Feather at XSEDE 13.

Date: Wednesday July 24, 2013
Time:  6:00 - 7:00pm
Location:  La Mesa, Marriott Marquis & Marina, San Diego, CA

Organizers: Kate Keahey, Lifka David, Manish Parashar and Warren Smith

The objective of this BOF is to bring together a community of current and prospective XSEDE cloud users to both provide and solicit information on scientific cloud use.

The BOF will consist of two parts. The first part will be informational; we will describe science clouds available on FutureGrid as well as Red Cloud and their capabilities, give examples of scientific and educational projects successfully using those clouds, as well as an overview of selected software tools facilitating cloud use. In the second part of the BOF we will discuss the motivation of participating XSEDE communities to move to cloud computing, expected benefits, as well as existing experiences based on the XSEDE cloud survey.

Please visit XSEDE 13 event listing for further details: http://sched.co/YcYA3J

We hope to see you there.

Service disruption

Update:  OK... Everything is back up and running.  Thanks for your patience as we responded to an unplanned power outage.

Update:  HPC -- India, bravo, delta and echo are back online. Cloud -- OpenStack and Eucalyptus are back online.  Xray is still being worked on.  

Earlier posts:  

Xray is down due to power failure.  Other IU resources may be unstable. FutureGrid Portal is up and running.  Check FutureGrid status page in the portal for updates as we work to restore access to the systems.  

FutureGrid resources at Indiana University - including the portal -  may not be accessible at this time.  We are investigating.  We will have things up and running again as soon as possible.  Thanks for your patience.