News on Nimbus Project

Sixth Chameleon User Meeting Focuses on Infrastructure for AI

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Sixth Chameleon User Meeting took place April 15–16, 2026 at the NSF NCAR Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, with a theme close to the whole community’s mind this year: infrastructure for AI and machine learning. The meeting brought together Chameleon users, operators, and collaborators to share how they are building, teaching with, and doing research on AI/ML infrastructure. Details and the full agenda are on the meeting page.

Highlights included a Day 1 keynote by Dr. Valerie Taylor (Argonne National Laboratory) on using large language models to refactor parallel scientific code for energy efficiency, alongside user talks and panels. Day 2 featured hands-on tutorials and a mini-symposium on AI for reproducibility, alongside education and research sessions — work that connects directly to our own efforts in FOUNT and REPETO.

Chameleon and FOUNT at SC25: Fraida Fund's EduHPC Paper, Student Posters, and More

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

SC25 in St. Louis (November 16–21, 2025) was a busy week for our team. At the EduHPC 2025 workshop, Kate Keahey presented “The Cost of Teaching Operational ML” (Fraida Fund, Kate Keahey, Cody Hammock, Marc Richardson, Mark Powers, and Michael Sherman), a FOUNT showcase that reports on running Fraida Fund’s large-scale “ML Systems Engineering and Operations” course for ~191 students on Chameleon — nearly 187,000 compute-instance hours, at a fraction of the equivalent commercial-cloud cost. Read the FOUNT announcement, the full paper (PDF) (DOI 10.1145/3731599.3767385), or the course materials and recording now online through FOUNT.

CHI@Edge at PEARC'25: Supporting Experimentation in the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Our paper “CHI@Edge: Supporting Experimentation in the Edge to Cloud Continuum” (Kate Keahey, Michael Sherman, Jason Anderson, and Mark Powers) was presented at PEARC’25 in Columbus, Ohio (July 20–24, 2025), where Mike Sherman gave the talk. The paper describes how CHI@Edge extends Chameleon’s testbed model out to real edge devices — letting researchers bring their own hardware, orchestrate containers across the edge-to-cloud continuum, and run reproducible experiments spanning everything from single sensors to the data center. You can read the full paper on the Chameleon site (PDF) or via its DOI, 10.1145/3708035.3736014.

ARA Wireless Living Lab Paper Published in Computer Networks

Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The paper “Design and Implementation of ARA Wireless Living Lab for Rural Broadband and Applications” (Taimoor Ul Islam et al.) has been published in Computer Networks, Vol. 263, Article 111188 (May 2025). ARA is a first-of-its-kind wireless living lab for rural broadband research, deployed across farms, communities, and roads in central Iowa, integrating high-capacity x-haul, programmable base stations, and even low-earth-orbit satellite links to support applications from precision agriculture to rural connectivity. A free, publicly available version is posted as an arXiv preprint.

Report on Challenges of Practical Reproducibility Published

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to share the “Report on Challenges of Practical Reproducibility for Systems and HPC Computer Science” (Kate Keahey, Marc Richardson, Rafael Tolosana Calasanz, Sascha Hunold, Jay Lofstead, Tanu Malik, and Christian Perez). The report distills the outcomes of the Community Workshop on Practical Reproducibility in HPC, held in Atlanta in November 2024, into a concrete set of challenges and recommendations for making systems and HPC research reproducible in practice. It is openly available on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.15306610) and summarized on the REPETO project site.

Hiring Research Software Engineer – Apply Now!

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Be Part of Cloud Computing’s Future

We’re excited to announce a new opportunity to join the Nimbus Project! We are hiring a Research Software Engineer who will work closely with our team to innovate in the fields of cloud computing, machine learning, and scientific applications.

The Nimbus team is known for its leadership in cloud computing research and development. As part of our team, you will contribute to building and operating a platform that adapts cloud computing to scientific needs, providing researchers worldwide with the tools to solve complex problems.

Early Bird Registration Open Until Sept. 30 for Workshop on Practical Reproducibility in HPC!

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Visit our workshop website!

We are excited to announce that registration is now open for the Community Workshop on Practical Reproducibility in HPC, scheduled for November 18, 2024 in Atlanta, GA, supported by the REPETO project. This workshop, which also serves as the 5th Chameleon User Meeting, aims to address the unique challenges and immense potential of reproducibility in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and systems research.

Early Bird Discount Available!

Take advantage of our early bird registration rate of just $20 if you register before September 30, 2024. After this date, the regular registration fee will be $100.

Chameleon Testbed Secures $12 Million in Funding for Phase 4

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled to announce that Chameleon, our experimental testbed for computer science research, has been awarded $12 million in funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) for its fourth phase. This latest grant brings the total investment in Chameleon to over $42 million across four funding phases.

Key Highlights:

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will move from an associate site to join as an official Chameleon site and partner, opening up vast opportunities for collaborations in translational computer science.
New infrastructure upgrades, including H100 GPUs, will enhance support for AI and Machine Learning research.
Continued development of CHI@Edge, supporting experiments from network fingerprinting to autonomous vehicles.
Ongoing commitment to reproducibility in computer science research.
And more to come!

Chameleon has served over 10,000 users and contributed to more than 700 research publications since its inception. This new funding will allow us to continue innovating and supporting our growing community, enabling groundbreaking discoveries in computer science systems research.

We thank the NSF for their continued support and look forward to the exciting advancements this new phase will bring to the computer science research community.

Read the full press release on the UChicago Computer Science Website.

Nimbus Project Hiring Senior Software Engineer!

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Join Our Team: Senior Research Software Engineer Position Open

Apply on the Nimbus Project website!

Are you ready to shape the future of scientific research? The Nimbus team, known for its pioneering work in cloud and edge computing, is looking for a Senior Research Software Engineer to join our dynamic group. This position offers the unique opportunity to work on the Chameleon platform, among other things, where you can contribute to transformative solutions that enhance scientific discovery.

Announcing Virtual Reproducibility Hackathon – December 15th, 2023

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Chameleon Virtual Reproducibility Hackathon

Learning how to produce reproducible experiments on Chameleon

We are excited to announce our Virtual Reproducibility Hackathon taking place on December 15, 2023, hosted by the Chameleon Team! See the details below for more information and to register.

About the Event

Reproducibility is not just a sound scientific practice – it also has many potential practical applications in teaching and creating new research results. At this event, the attendees will learn about how to package their computer science research experiments in such a way that they are not only reproducible – but also practically reproducible, i.e., capable of being reproduced easily enough to be used as a mainstream method of interactive scientific exploration and exchange.

Chameleon presents AutoLearn, IndySCC’23 success, and more at SC’23

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Did you attend SC’23? Check out the initiatives Chameleon supported at the event, including workshops, papers written using Chameleon, and more! If you presented something related to Chameleon at SC’23 and are not on this list, send us an email – we will update this announcement with relevant information as we get it.

Presentations and Talks

Alicia Esquivel Morel presented the paper, AutoLearn: Learning in the Edge to Cloud Continuum, at EduHPC-23: Workshop on Education for High Performance Computing (Monday, November 13, 2023; Location: Room 506, 2:39 – 2:47 PM MT). The paper presents a Trovi artifact that allows you to teach topics in engineering and machine learning related to autonomous vehicles.

Announcing Reproducibility Hackathon at the IC2E Conference

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce the Reproducibility Hackathon at the IC2E Conference taking place September 25-28, 2023 in Boston!

The hackathon, hosted by Kate Keahey of Argonne National Laboratory and Ibrahim Matta of Boston University, will take place on Monday September 25th and run the whole day. From the abstract:

Reproducibility is not just a sound scientific practice – it also has many potential practical applications in teaching and creating new research results. In this tutorial, the attendees will learn about how to package their computer science research experiments in such a way that they are not only reproducible – but also practically reproducible, i.e., capable of being reproduced easily enough to be used as a mainstream method of interactive scientific exploration and exchange.

We are hiring a research software engineer!

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We have another position open for a research software engineer to work on our exciting new projects in reproducibility and edge computing, at University of Chicago to be part of the Nimbus team. For more details and to apply please visit the job posting.

New REPETO project to address the challenge of practical reproducibility.

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Great news for the Nimbus team: we are excited to be starting work on the REPETO project that will develop methods of packaging experiments in ways that make them readily reproducible and encourage activities around reproducing research. For more information see: https://cs.uchicago.edu/news/uchicago-leads-new-research-coordination-network-for-promoting-cs-reproducibility/

We are hiring a senior research software engineer!

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are seeking a senior research software engineer at University of Chicago to be part of the Nimbus team. For more details and to apply please visit the job posting.

Nimbus Team Wins PEARC ‘22 Best Paper Award

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

For the upcoming ACM Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing Conference of 2022, Chameleon will be presented with the Best Paper Award for our single sign-on migration paper! See this article published by the University of Chicago computer science department about the achievement.

Seeking summer students for 2021

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are looking for summer students for a variety of exciting projects within the Nimbus team! Please check out the projects here and sign up if you are interested in working with us this summer. (Go to the sign up form)

We are hiring a senior cloud computing software developer!

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Feb 15, 2021

We are seeking a senior cloud computing software developer at University of Chicago to be part of the Nimbus team. For more details and to apply please visit the job posting.

We are hiring a junior cloud computing software developer!

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Feb 08, 2021

Update: this position has been filled.
We are seeking a junior cloud computing software developer at University of Chicago to be part of the Nimbus team. For more details and to apply please visit the job posting.

The Nimbus Infrastrucure, then and now

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sep 22, 2020

Nimbus Infrastructure was one of the first open source implementations of the concept of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with the production release of the first component, the Workspace Service, released in mid-2005. Overtime, the system grew to add an implementation of a scalable quota-based storage cloud, contextualization tools, allowing users to configure “one click” virtual clusters, as well as a variety of tools creating and managing configurations distributed over multiple clouds, and adapting them to the needs of the scientific community. Nimbus software was used to configure multiple research clouds (FutureGrid being the most prominent example) as well as enable a variety of scientific applications.

We are hiring a cloud computing software developer!

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sep 22, 2020

We are seeking a cloud computing software developer at University of Chicago to be part of the Nimbus team. For more details and to apply please visit the job posting.

We are hiring a product lead for Chameleon!

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sep 22, 2020

Update: this position has been filled.
We are seeking a product lead at University of Chicago to be part of the Nimbus team and work on managing the growth of the Chameleon project. For more details and to apply please visit the job posting.

We are hiring a Cloud Computing Software Developer

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Nov 15, 2017

We are seeking a cloud computing software developer at University of Chicago to be part of the Nimbus team. Most of our development is in Python and we use OpenStack on several projects.

For more details and to apply please visit our jobs page.

2017 summer student projects are out!

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Mar 29, 2017

We are looking for summer student to work on three different projects. The work location is the Argonne National Laboratory, near Chicago, Illinois. If you are interested in working with us on any of these, contact Kate Keahey.

Investigating Hadoop dynamic scaling

We are creating a platform for running geospatial analysis operations in a scalable manner using cloud computing resources. In order to support large number of users with varying workloads, the platform must dynamically manage deployments of compute resources.

We are hiring a cloud computing software developer

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Nov 14, 2016

We are seeking a cloud computing software developer at University of Chicago to be part of the Nimbus team. Most of our development is in Python and we use OpenStack on several projects.

For more details and to apply please visit the job posting.

About us:

The Nimbus team is a pioneer in infrastructure cloud computing. We work closely with scientists across many disciplines to understand how new technology can improve and transform science, develop and integrate innovative solutions in cloud computing, and support their practical use. Our previous work includes developing the first open source IaaS platform (since 2005, www.nimbusproject.org), enabling many early cloud computing projects across a range of sciences, and developing a national experimental testbed for cloud computing research (since 2014, www.chameleoncloud.org). Current challenges focus particularly on cloud computing platforms supporting High Performance Computing and Big Data applications and systems. The Nimbus team consists of scientists, developers, and students and provides a friendly, challenge oriented environment.

We are hiring!

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sep 28, 2015

The Nimbus Project is recruiting a software developer at University of Chicago.

To apply please visit https://jobopportunities.uchicago.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=229408

About us: The Nimbus team is a globally recognized pioneer in infrastructure cloud computing. We created the first ever open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service implementation, and are constantly evolving and thriving on the leading edge of cloud services technologies. We work closely with scientific application communities to develop innovative solutions in cloud computing infrastructures and platforms, with particular focus on High Performance Computing and Big Data systems. To facilitate cloud computing research on a national scale, we also operate an experimental testbed supporting cloud computing research. Our overall mission is to develop innovative technical solutions that create new opportunities in science. The Nimbus team provides a friendly, collegial environment where you will be challenged to help create these groundbreaking new cloud technologies.

New paper on traffic-sensitive live migration of virtual machines

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Apr 14, 2015

Umesh Deshpande will present his latest paper on traffic-sensitive live migration of virtual machines at CCGrid 2015. This research was performed in collaboration with the Nimbus team.

New paper on transparent throughput elasticity for IaaS cloud storage

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Dec 15, 2014

On December 9th, Pierre Riteau presented our paper Transparent Throughput Elasticity for IaaS Cloud Storage Using Guest-Side Block-Level Caching at UCC 2014. The slides are available online.

Shutdown of Nimbus Hotel clouds on FutureGrid

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Sep 15, 2014

This announcement concerns users of the FutureGrid Hotel resources.

Early this year, we announced a move towards shutting down the Nimbus-Xen cloud on Hotel and the creation of Nimbus-KVM in addition to the OpenStack-KVM cloud already operated on this resource. However, since most of our users chose to move to the OpenStack-KVM cloud as a result of this change, we decided to operate the Nimbus clouds for a longer time allowing the community to fully transition to OpenStack.

NSF awards $10 million to develop the Chameleon cloud testbed

Thu, 28 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Aug 28, 2014

The Nimbus team is proud and exited to be part of the development of Chameleon, a new experimental testbed for cloud architecture and applications. For more details, visit the official website at https://www.chameleoncloud.org.

New Phantomize feature: automatic installation of tcollector sensor agent

Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Jul 15, 2014

We are happy to announce “phantomize”, a Phantom feature that will automatically install and run the tcollector sensor agent on the first boot of your virtual machines thereby automatically instrumenting your VMs to provide sensor measurements.

Phantom offers autoscaling based on sensor measurements from a variety of sources, including user’s virtual machines. To collect these measurements, Phantom relies on the tcollector sensor agent being running on each of those virtual machines. Until now, users had to manually install tcollector in their virtual machines or use an image provided by us with tcollector already installed. The former requires extra effort and the latter restricts the user to the types of images provided by us.

FutureGrid multi-cloud VM image generator now available

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Jun 04, 2014

We are happy to announce the alpha release of our newest tool for FutureGrid users: a multi-cloud VM image generator.

FutureGrid offers access to multiple clouds based on several different technologies (Nimbus, OpenStack, and Eucalyptus) using different hypervisors (Xen or KVM). Users can also supplement the use of FutureGrid resources by bursting out to commercial clouds such as Amazon EC2. While this allows users to use multiple clouds, such access is often hard to leverage as VM images are generally not portable across different formats and cloud providers.

New paper on cloud computing for on-demand and scalable CyberGIS analytics

Thu, 15 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

May 15, 2014

Our paper A Cloud Computing Approach to On-Demand and Scalable CyberGIS Analytics was accepted to the ScienceCloud 2014 workshop. It will be presented on June 23rd, 2014 in Vancouver, Canada.

We are recruiting!

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Mar 06, 2014

The Nimbus Project is recruiting for a postdoc on cloud computing at Argonne National Laboratory (Illinois, USA).

The successful applicant will work with the Nimbus team at Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago to develop innovative resource management technology allowing the use of high-performance computing (HPC) resources with a cloud model. The challenges span the definition of resource leases suitable in the HPC context, developing topology-aware solutions, as well as defining policies that will ensure good utilization of HPC resources while providing on-demand leases for the end-user. The work will also involve adaptive use of a federation of resources providing those capabilities for a range of scientific applications.

Nimbus Phantom demo at SC13 and on YouTube

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Nov 20, 2013

You can see Nimbus Phantom in action at SC13! Visit NCSA booth #1122 for a demo of Nimbus Phantom scaling a CyberGIS application.

And for those not lucky enough to attend SC13, you can watch our demo video on YouTube!

Nimbus Phantom summer update

Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Oct 22, 2013

Hello Phantom Users!

As the days are getting shorter, and the air is getting cooler, we’d like to take one last look back on the summer and highlight the work we’ve done since we announced the Phantom HTTP API in early July. Some of you might have already noticed them in the interface and maybe even started using them – here’s a quick summary of the changes that already happened and how they fit into our strategy going forward.

OSG 1.0.0 virtual cluster available on Nimbus

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Dec 16, 2008

Now available on the UofC Nimbus cloud: images based on Debian 4.0 with the OSG 1.0.0 software stack installed.

Read more here (includes launch instructions).

eScience 2008 talk

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Dec 11, 2008

How to make a virtual cluster with one click: Kate will talk about our work on automated virtual cluster deployment at the eScience conference on Thursday, December 11th at 1:30 pm.

Our virtual cluster deployment tools have been used to create production virtual clusters for scientific applications on EC2 as well as the Science Clouds for the past year.

And speaking of Science Clouds and virtual clusters: Mauricio Tsugawa will talk about CloudBLAST and Ewa Deelman will talk about Montage virtual clusters.

Nimbus Guestbook

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Nov 19, 2008

See what Nimbus users are saying on the guestbook page.

Science Cloud Available at Masaryk University’s MetaCentrum

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Nov 19, 2008

The Kupa compute cloud at Masaryk University’s MetaCentrum is available.

Nimbus at Supercomputing 2008

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Nov 16-19, 2008

Ioan Raicu will discuss Nimbus in his talk Cloud Computing and Grid Computing 360-Degree Compared on November 16th, from 1:00PM to 1:30PM at GCE08 in room 11AB.

Kate Keahey will discuss Nimbus in her talk The Nimbus CloudKit: the best open source EC2 no money can buy on November 19th, from 4:30PM to 5:00PM at the Argonne booth.

See you there!

Update: download the talk here.

Science Cloud Available at Purdue University

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Nov 04, 2008

The Wispy compute cloud at Purdue University is available.

Website update

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Oct 31, 2008

Happy Halloween, a scary new website is online. If you want the old pages back, send us some candy.

Paper accepted to eScience 2008

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Oct 28, 2008

Our paper Contextualization: Providing One-Click Virtual Clusters was accepted to the eScience 2008 conference. It will be presented between December 10-12 in Indianapolis.

Science Cloud Presentation at CCA08

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Oct 23, 2008

Kate Keahey presented our early experiences of the Science Clouds project at the CCA08 Workshop.

You can download the slides here:
https://workspace.globus.org/talks/ScienceClouds-CCA08.ppt

Monitoring contributions to Nimbus

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Oct 21, 2008

Michael Paterson and Ian Gable (University of Victoria / HEPnet Canada / ATLAS) have contributed a Nagios monitoring component for Nimbus as well as an aggregator for use with MDS.

Download and Installation instructions for the Nagios plugins can be found here and for the MDS Aggregator Source here.

They are looking for feedback!

Nimbus TP2.1 released!

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Oct 16, 2008

The main new features provided in this release are tools facilitating the deployment, configuration and management of clouds. We also updated our implementation to match the current Amazon EC2 deployment. In addition, the release contains new documentation and bug fixes.

You can download the new release from:
https://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html

The full changelog can be found here:
https://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP2.1/index.html#changelog

Pilot Presentation at Euro-Par 2008

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Aug 28, 2008

Tim Freeman gave a talk about the design and implementation of the workspace pilot at the Euro-Par 2008 conference in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain (talk, paper).

Nimbus TP2.0 released!

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Aug 18, 2008

See the announcement for details.

AliEn ALICE jobs on the Nimbus Cloud

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Jul 30, 2008

In collaboration with Artem Harutyunyan and Predrag Buncic, AliEn based images are launching on Nimbus in support of the ALICE experiment to carry out simulation, reconstruction and distributed analysis of physics data. After one VM makes site services available, AliEn Job Agents can launch and retrieve jobs from the main task queue to execute.

See this screenshot of the incorporation! Nimbus is the ‘Cloud’ site in Chicago. See this screenshot for a bird’s eye view of the whole operation.

TeraGrid Cloud demonstration

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Jul 11, 2008

Kate Keahey and Tim Freeman demonstrated the cloud client for starting VMs and auto-configuring clusters for the TeraGrid gateways project.

TG08 BoF: Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and TeraGrid

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Jun 10, 2008

Kate Keahey and Marlon Pierce presented Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and TeraGrid at TeraGrid 2008.

Virtual Workspace Service TP1.3.3.1 released

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Jul 09, 2008

TP1.3.3.1 replaces TP1.3.3 to get a bugfix pushed out.

See the announcement for details.

Virtual Workspace Service TP1.3.3 released

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Jul 07, 2008

The main new feature provided in this release is the ability to deploy “one-click” virtual clusters — a much awaited release of the contextualization functions allowing users to create self-configurable virtual clusters on the fly. The new feature comes with improvements to the ensemble service and image compression facilities that extend the range of deployment scenarios in which it can be used.

See the changelog for all the details.

cloud-client 009 available

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Jul 07, 2008

See the cloud pages to download the new cloud client #009. A lot of enhancements have been added including support for “one-click” clusters. You need to upgrade to this release in order to continue using the clouds. See its CHANGES.txt file for a list of enhancements.

cloud-client 008 available

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

May 30, 2008

See the Nimbus pages to download the new cloud client #008. Notable changes include new “–download” option allows you to easily grab a template or result image in your personal directory, new “–delete” option allows you to delete images in your personal directory

Welcome Google Summer of Code students!

Mon, 26 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

May 26, 2008

We are excited to welcome Artem Harutyunyan and Michael Fenn to the team by way of the Google Summer of Code 2008.
- Michael Fenn – Implementing a KVM backend to the Globus workspace service
- Artem Harutyunyan – Development of dynamic resource trading service for Virtual Workspaces
Thank you Google, Inc. for your generous support of open source software.

Virtual Workspace Service TP1.3.2 released

Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

May 23, 2008

Workspace Service TP1.3.2 has been released, the “cloudkit” release. Support for the new cloud configuration and many smaller enhancements/bug fixes. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.3.2 pages.

cloud-client 007 available

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

May 14, 2008

See the Nimbus pages to download the new cloud client #007. Notable changes include new “–download” option allows you to easily grab a template or result image in your personal directory, new “–delete” option allows you to delete images in your personal directory

Science Cloud Available at the University of Florida

Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

May 13, 2008

The Stratus compute cloud at the University of Florida is available, see the announcement and clouds page for more details.

Virtual Workspaces Tutorial at Open Source Grid Cluster

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

May 12-16, 2008

There will be a Virtual Workspaces tutorial at the Open Source Grid Cluster conference in Oakland, CA. The conference is May 12-16, 2008. The Virtualization and Cloud Computing with Globus session is on Wednesday, May 14th, from 4:30-6:00 pm. We hope to see you there!

Quoting from the summary:

One of the primary obstacles users face in grid computing is that Grids provide access to many diverse resources, their applications often require a very specific, customized environment. This disconnect can lead to resource underutilization, user frustration, and much wasted effort spent on bridging the gap between applications and resources. Virtual Workspaces describe the environment required for the execution of an application that can be dynamically deployed across a variety of resources creating a working and consistent platform for grid applications.

ISGTW Feature

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Apr 30, 2008

Feature – The new Nimbus: first steps in the clouds

cloud-client 006 available

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Apr 15, 2008

See the Nimbus pages to download the new cloud client #006. One of the notable changes is the new “–save” option that allows you to persist workspace changes back to your personal directory after running. Previous cloud client versions are now wire-incompatible with Nimbus.

Science Cloud Available at the University of Chicago

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Mar 04, 2008

The Nimbus compute cloud at the University of Chicago is available, see the announcement and documentation for more details.

Virtual Workspace Service TP1.3.1 released

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Feb 14, 2008

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.3.1 has been released, adding non-invasive site scheduler integration, support for coscheduled, heteregenous virtual clusters, and several small enhancements/bug fixes. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.3.1 pages.

Virtual Workspaces at Supercomputing 2007

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Nov 13-14, 2007

Kate Keahey presented Globus Virtual Workspaces – An Update in several booths at SC07 in Reno, NV.

Presentation at HEPiX Fall 2007

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Nov 7, 2007

Kate Keahey presented Globus Virtual Workspaces at the HEPiX Fall 2007 forum in St. Louis, MO.

Virtual Workspace Service TP1.3 released

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Nov 1, 2007

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.3 has been released, adding group support, client usage accounting, enhancements to make configuration easier, and several bug fixes. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.3 pages.

The first one-click STAR production cluster

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Sep 12, 2007

The STAR community successfully completed its first production-size deployment of a VM-based virtual cluster managed by the workspace service and backed by EC2 resources.

The 100 node cluster was composed of a headnode and workernodes based on the OSG 0.6.0 grid middleware stack and Torque. Its deployment-time configuration was securely coordinated by the new workspace contextualization technology.

Virtual Workspaces at CHEP 2007

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Sep 2-7, 2007

Our collaborators from University of Victoria will present a talk at the CHEP 2007 conference summarizing their experiences using the Virtual Workspace Service to stand up and manage virtual machines.

The STAR community also presented a talk describing the use of our EC2 portal to run STAR applications. The slides are available for download.

SciDAC 2007 conference paper and poster online

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Our paper Virtual Workspaces for Scientific Applications and same named poster from the SciDAC 2007 conference are now online.

HPDC 2007 “Hot Topics” paper accepted and online

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Our short paper on enabling cost-effective resource leases was accepted to the Hot Topics session in the HPDC 2007 conference and is now online: Enabling Cost-Effective Resource Leases with Virtual Machines

This paper discusses how virtualization can facilitate short-term leasing of resources, while allowing resource providers to continue support for existing batch workloads and their current job execution software stack. The paper discusses preliminary results obtained so far, and future work in our group on an architecture to support cost-effective resource leasing.

HPDC 2007 “Hot Topics” talk is online

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The HPDC 2007 “Hot Topics” slides are now online: Enabling Cost-Effective Resource Leases with Virtual Machines

Teraport and Amazon EC2 deployments

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Two new Virtual Workspace Service deployments are online, see the Deployments page. One of them is a gateway service to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), see here for more information on the EC2 integration.

“A Scalable Approach” presented at TeraGrid ’07

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A Scalable Approach To Deploying And Managing Appliances (pdf) was presented at TeraGrid ’07 (Madison, WI). Slides from Kate’s talk are available: ppt.

HTTP GET with decompression enables marketplace “one click” integration

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

With the TP1.2.3 release, it is possible to point to VM images from VM appliance marketplaces such as rBuilder and deploy via the Workspace Service in a easy manner.

“A Scalable Approach” paper made available online

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Our paper about virtual appliance configuration and management was accepted to the TeraGrid 2007 conference and is now online: A Scalable Approach To Deploying And Managing Appliances

This paper examines configuration and security issues that large and heterogeneous deployments of virtual appliances/workspaces will face.

Virtual Workspace Service TP1.2.3 released

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.2.3 has been released, adding multiple partition management, blankspace creation, an HTTP transfer adapter, and improved scheduling criteria. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.2.3 pages.

Workspace Marketplace is online

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The Workspace Marketplace is online, an outlet for VM images specifically geared towards distributed and high performance computing.

Borja Sotomayor’s Master’s thesis accepted and online

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Borja Sotomayor’s Masters thesis, A Resource Management Model for VM-Based Virtual Workspaces is accepted and available online.

Virtual Workspace Service TP1.2.2 released

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.2.2 has been released, adding support for DHCP based networking configuration, unit tests, and changes to the logistics metadata. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.2.2 pages.

“Division of Labor” paper was presented at ICSOC 2006

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Our paper Division of Labor: Tools for Growth and Scalability of Grids (Freeman, T., K. Keahey, I. Foster, A. Rana, B. Sotomayor, F. Wuerthwein) (pdf) was presented at ICSOC 2006 (Chicago, IL). Slides from the talk are available: ppt.

Virtual Workspace Service TP1.2.1 released

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.2.1 has been released. This is a bugfix only release. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.2.1 pages.

“Overhead Matters” paper was presented at VTDC 06

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Our paper Overhead Matters: A Model for Virtual Resource Management (Sotomayor, B., K. Keahey, I. Foster) (pdf) was presented at VTDC 06 (held in conjunction with SC06, Tampa, FL).

Workspace talks in the ANL/MCS booth, Supercomputing 2006

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Slides from the talk are available: pdf.

Kate Keahey spoke on “On-Demand Virtual Workspaces: Quality of Life in the Grid”

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Kate Keahey spoke on “On-Demand Virtual Workspaces: Quality of Life in the Grid” at the Fifth Meeting of the Spanish Initiative in Grid Middleware (Nov 13-14, 2006).

Slides from the talk are available: ppt.

Virtual Workspace Service TP1.2 released

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The virtual machines based Workspace Service TP1.2 has been released. For a detailed changelog, see the TP1.2 pages.