fluid Operations and D-Grid are collaborating on a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, with the goal of expanding the existing D-Grid infrastructure with an interface for commercial compute Clouds. This new interface, which is provided by fluid Operations’ eCloudManager, will enable D-Grid to expand its customer base to include SMEs, thereby achieving an economically sustainable Grid.
To achieve the objectives of the project, D-Grid will rely on the fluid Operations eCloudManager to provide a Self-Service component which will allow customers to deploy their applications, manage their deployments and monitor their Grid usage. Similarly, D-Grid operators can use the eCloudManager to manage resource provisioning, data center operations, and billing and accounting.
Events
D-Grid All-Hands-Meeting in Dresden
In March 2010, Dr. Andreas Eberhart, fluid Operations Managing Director, and Stefan Freitag from the Technical University Dortmund, held a presentation at the D-Grid All-Hands-Meeting, discussing the implications of virtualization for the D-Grid Project. Virtualization has brought along an opportunity to implement fine-grained reources configurations, enabling a much more flexible and dynamic implamentation of customer requirements, and although Grid and Cloud Computing are based on a similar strategy of using external IT services and resources, there is very little connection between the two. The purpose of the session was to determine whether such an integration would make sense and what the advantages and disadvantages would be. See presentation.
News
eCloudManager now with GLUE 2.0-Support
The fluidOps eCloudManager delivers support for information provisioning using the GLUE 2.0 Format. The underlying schema of this format is the model for representing resources and their properties and is used in numerous grids, including the Open Science, LHC, and D-Grid. More »
First D-Grid Site Runs eCloudManager
January 2011: TU Dortmund has successfully installed eCloudManager to monitor its Xen-based datacenter. In addition, the users registered within the D-Grid infrastructure are merged with the eCloudManager, enabling them to use the eCloudManager Self-Service portal. Read interim report (in German).
Announcement by the Technical University Dortmund
In an official press release, the Technical University Dortmund announced its collaboration with fluid Operations in a project aiming at combining the advantages of two worlds – scientific and commercial high performance computers. Read press release (in German).
Announcement by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
In June 2010 in an official press release on their website, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research announced that fluid Operations has entered a funding initiative, aiming at expanding the D-Grid infrastructure so as to enable D-Grid to also target SMEs. Read press release (in German).