No Huddle Offense

The Cloud & Standards collaboration

Cloud Computing is a hype topic, most of you know that. Still there is a lot of interesting stuff going on during the past months and weeks. As one of the chairs of the OCCI (http://www.occi-wg.org) working group I had the great opportunity to present the status and some cloud related work during the Cloud Computing and its Applications conference. I was invited by Ian Foster to present the following slides:

What it comes done to is the following: During OGF27 (http://www.ogf.org/OGF27) we stated to present one of the first standardized Cloud interfaces. We are almost there and soon the specification will be out in the public comments phase of the OGF editor pipeline. More important than having one standard is to have the standards collaborate while each focus on a different aspect. For example the Cloud Data Management Interface driven by SNIA (http://www.snia.org). Now we need some more efforts like demos demonstrating interoperable and portable cloud solutions.

If you wanna know what is going on for OCCI right now: We had a lot of blog posts, mails, etc going on…

BTW the OCCI sessions during OGF27 itself went pretty well and both OCCI and myself have been in the closing remarks from Craig Lee:

Categories: Work • Tags: Cloud, OCCI, OGF • Permalink for this article

My slides for OGF27 about OCCI, the Cloud and HPCcloud

Categories: Personal, Work • Tags: GridEngine, OCCI, OGF • Permalink for this article

Remote Component Environment

While I worked for the German Aerospace Center (DLR) I was in the lead of a project team working on the SESIS project. Definitely one of the most interesting projects I ever head. During this time I was in charge of the development of the Reconfigurable Computing Environment (RCE). Since then I moved on and started to work for Sun. But the project has moved on – And I am so happy to see it grow more mature! RCE has now been released under a open source license and been renamed to Remote Component Environment! Great stuff – Two days ago it hit version 1.4.0 – My congratulations!

Categories: Personal, Work • Tags: RCE, Software Engineering • Permalink for this article

Keep your OpenSolaris installation slim/clean

I really like OpenSolaris. If you haven’t tried it yet you should give it a try. Still there are some things where I choose other operating system over OpenSolaris. Missing ports for some of the application I use is one point…

But never the less OpenSolaris has some killer features which makes is worth a try. For example ZFS, Zones or DTrace.

One tool I absolutely like when using Linux is the packaging system and the ability to clean up orphaned (e.g. with help of deborphan) packages. After some googleing it seemed that there is nothing in OpenSolaris yet to do so. But here are some tips and tricks to keep your installation clean as long as the feature is not available…

1. On a laptop use ZFS compression:
   zfs set compression=on rpool
2. Turn of the caching in pkg. (This will save you a lot disc space!)
   pkg set-property flush-content-cache-on-success True
   Downloaded packages are then no longer kept on your harddrive in /var/pkg/download
3. deactivate unneeded services / uninstall software. This is a personal one – Decide what tools you wanna have and which ones not (Presumably you can uninstall a lot of the languages packs). Some service which you could deactivate are:
   svc:/application/desktop-cache/input-method-cache:default
svc:/application/desktop-cache/mime-types-cache:default
svc:/application/desktop-cache/icon-cache:default
svc:/application/desktop-cache/desktop-mime-cache:default
svc:/application/print/ppd-cache-update:default

   Use the following command to do so
   svcadm disable ${svc}
svccfg delete ${svc}
4. Find leaf/orphaned packages – This is more complicated but also a very important part. Especially some libs which you do not need any longer tend to stay. What you can do is the following – Find all the dependencies using
   /bin/pkg search -l \'depend::\'
   And then find all installed packages:
   pkg list
   All items which are installed but nobody depends on – are therefore leafs/orphaned. But be carefully – this will also list eclipse etc. But this is a way to find the orphaned libs. Personally I did some parsing with python to parse the two list of dependencies and installed packages to find the unique ones.

Overall these actions saved me 4Gb of space. Next thing to play with is tuning ZFS 🙂 Installing it on hybrid system. Have a look here: http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test

Categories: Personal, Work • Tags: OpenSolaris • Permalink for this article

Haiku OS Alpha released

For those who still know BeOS – Haiku OS released a Alpha version! http://www.haiku-os.org

Categories: Personal • Tags: Tech • Permalink for this article