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. 

FutureGrid provided hands on experience for participants at Cloud Computing and Software-defined Networking tutorial at Mini-PRAGMA 2013, Indonesia

FutureGrid Co-PI Jose Fortes (University of Florida) conducted a 1-day tutorial on Cloud Computing and Software-defined Networking at Universitas Indonesia on June 3, 2013. This event was part of a workshop organized by PRAGMA and Universitas Indonesia on topics related to middleware, international collaboration and biodiversity. 

The tutorial broadly covered: 

"What, Why, When of Cloud Computing" 

This session introduced attendees to the different types of clouds (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and others), explained the benefits of their services, illustrated successful uses of cloud systems; examples using commercial and/or public clouds were considered.

"How to Build a Cloud" 

This session introduced attendees to open-source software that can be used to manage and deliver cloud services. Examples using Openstack were covered.

"What, Why, When of Software-Defined Networking" 

This session introduced the key concepts and basic technologies for software-defined networking and illustrated them with applications. Openflow and virtual networking were discussed.

"How to Use One (or More) Clouds" 

This session introduced the attendees to advanced concepts such as the Intercloud and the use of Hadoop for big-data applications.

The tutorial included demos and hands-on activities where students used FutureGrid resources to deploy concepts and software introduced during the tutorial. There were forty participants including students, research assistants, researchers, system administrator, and faculty. They came from various background such as Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Pharmacy of Universitas Indonesia.

Service Outage --- June 4, 2013 --- Indiana University Resources.

All FutureGrid resources at Indiana University will be down on June 4, 2013 from 6:00 AM -- 5:00 PM EDT due to planned electrical work and equipment relocation in the Indiana University Data Center.  This will affect:

• Bravo
• Delta
• Echo
• India
• Xray
• The FutureGrid Portal (http://portal.futuregrid.org)

Email to help@futuregrid.org will be queued during the service outage.  We will respond to any email as soon as possible after services are restored.

We will update this post as work progresses.

Current Status:

• 06/04/2013 06:00 AM: Service shutdowns will begin.

• 06/04/2013 12:00 PM: Work progressing on schedule.

• 06/04/2013 06:30 PM: Electrical work completed, network reconfiguration still in progress.

• 06/04/2013 08:30 PM: Network reconfiguration still in progress.  Xray is available.

• 06/04/2013 11:15 PM: All resources should now be available.  Please report any issues to help@futuregrid.org