From Application to Appliance Predrag Buncic

Overview Virtual Machines Appliances Demo Technology Forecast Hardware, software & virtual software appliance Demo Technology Forecast Clouds over Grid Conclusions CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 2

Back to the future… Some time ago… Then, things changed.. Today We had an application statically linked running in a VM prefect isolation Strict application boundary Then, things changed.. Unix workstations, PC, commodity computing Memory was still expensive Shared libraries, dynamical linking, plugins Fuzzy application boundary IBM-VM 360 mainframe, 1988 Today Memory and disk space is cheap Virtual Machines running on commodity hardware on Open Source OS are promising to deliver what we lost some time ago CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 3

Why (again) Virtual Machines? The system infrastructure can evolve independently from the evolution of the application Re-creating application boundary Now we can Start, Stop, Pause, Migrate VM Software running inside a VM can not negatively affect the execution of another VM VMs can provide a perfect process and file sandboxing The application can (re)use a lot of code which was previously is system/kernel domain Fancy user space file systems via kernel modules CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 4

Virtual Software Appliance = Application + Virtual Machine + Simple UI Virtual Appliances This talk is about VM running your favourite application on your laptop or desktop Virtual Software Appliance = Application + Virtual Machine + Simple UI Virtual Software Appliance is a lightweight Virtual Machine image that combines minimal operating environment specialized application functionality These appliances are designed to run under one or more of the various virtualization technologies, such as VMware , Xen, Parallels, Microsoft Virtual PC, QEMU, User mode Linux, CoLinux, Virtual Iron… Virtual Software Appliances also aim to eliminate the issues related to deployment in a traditional server environment complex configuration maintenance CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 5

rPath: Software Appliance Company CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 6

rPath Technologies Conary rPath Linux rBuilder the underlying package management technology for rPath Linux rPath provides instructions to package software from various popular sources and package technologies rPath Linux Linux distribution created as the basic operating system for Conary-based appliances rBuilder rPath's tool for building appliances eliminates unnecessary components and provides only the software needed by the applications on your appliance. rPath Appliance Platform (rAP) The rPath Appliance Platform (rAP) is rPath's extensible tool providing a web-based user interface for maintaining appliances rMake rMake is rPath's tool for allowing full clean rebuilds of the software used in an appliance when significant modifications are made to the core operating system components CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 7

Practical exercise: AliEn Appliance External Dependencies AliEn busybox (system tools) ggbox System devices Kernel + = Grid Appliance CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 8

/coda -> /opt/alien, /opt/packages Coda File System CODA is a distributed file system with its origin in AFS2. It is freely available under a liberal license has several features not found elsewhere: disconnected operation for mobile computing high performance through client side persistent caching and server replication security model for authentication, encryption and access control continued operation during partial network failures in server network network bandwidth adaptation well defined semantics of sharing, even in the presence of network failures /coda -> /opt/alien, /opt/packages CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 9

AliEnX AliEn Linux – minimal guest OS capable of running AliEn services and hosting Grid applications http://alien.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AliEnX http://alien.rpath.org Built using rPath tools (rBuilder and Conary package manager) Very similar to what we were trying to do with AliEn BITS CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 10

AliEn Appliance AliEn Appliance Version 0.4 x86 Mountable Filesystem (Xen Virtual Appliance) x86_64 Mountable Filesystem (Xen Virtual Appliance) x86 VMware (R) ESX Server Virtual Appliance x86 Installable CD/DVD x86_64 Parallels, QEMU (Raw Hard Disk) x86 Parallels, QEMU (Raw Hard Disk) Already usable as User Interface Generic, can be customized for other purposes To do: Run Grid Jobs in VM Prototyping together with Globus developers at Teraport cluster at University of Chicago Start and manage VMs using Globus Workspace Service CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 11

Benchmarks Test machine 1 GB RAM 3 GHz Pentium D 100 particles, standard AliRoot setup Xen 3.0.3 Native Simulation 193 s 191.5 s Reconstruction 52 s 51 s CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 12

Download history CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 13

Demo time… CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 14

AliEn Way: Grid Layered Cake Large “physical grid(s)” Reliably execute jobs, store, retrieve and move files Individual V.O. have at given point in time access to a subset of physical resources Using standard tools to submit jobs (Job Agents) to physical grid layer, V.O. creates ‘upper’ middleware layer, an overlay grid tailored to V.O needs but on smaller scale V.O has identity and can handle interactions with physical layer on users behalf Individual users interacting with V.O middleware will typically see a subset of the resources available to the entire VO Each session will have certain number of resources allocated Virtual Cluster (User layer) Virtual Grid (V.O. layer) Physical Grid (Common layer) Reducing scale to achieve scalability CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 15

Cloud over Grid SQS + S3 + EC2 Physical Grid (Common) Simple Queue Service (SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers Simple Storage Service (S3) provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 16

rPath + Amazon Software developers use rBuilder to build an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is stored using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). With a single click, rBuilder and rBuilder Online users can boot their software appliances on Amazon EC2. User has a complete control of instances 1.7Ghz x86 processor 1.75GB of RAM 60GB of local disk 250Mb/s of network bandwidth. User can load them with their unique software appliance image manage their network's access permissions and run their image using as many or few systems as they desire. http://www.rpath.com/amazon CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 17

$ ? $$$ vs ??? Everything has the price… How much would it cost? $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used $0.10 per instance-hour consumed $0.20 per GB of data transferred in/out How much would it cost? Store 10PB/year Use 40k CPUs for processing $ ? We have faster network We have 40k CPUs We have the storage Why don’t we have 99.99% service availability? storage 1.8 10000000 $18,000,000.00 in 0.2 $2,000,000.00 out cpu 0.1 350400000 $35,040,000.00   $57,040,000.00 CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 18

What did they do differently? Storage Scale as an advantage Adding nodes to the system increases, not decreases, its availability, speed, throughput, capacity, and robustness P2P model 99.99% data availability There can be no single points of failure Redundant data copies on spinning media Computing Elastic EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days Integrated Designed for use with S3 Secure Uniform Uses VM technology to provision uniform representation of computational resources to end user Security and messaging Web (portal) and Web services provide entry points into the system But internally, system uses reliable message queues Event driven rather than service oriented implementation CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 19

Use cases for Virtual Machines Grid Sandbox environment for job execution on WN Enhanced site security VO box Enhanced Scalability User Interfaces Separation of Grid and system environment Reducing Grid initiation threshold Specialized environments PROOF/CAF process migration kernel modules to enable fancy user space file systems P2P like object sharing and caching Training setups Make sure that everyone has the same environment when they walk in training room Testing environments Easy to setup, saving time and money CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 20

Conclusions Virtual Machine are coming back as viable technology with lots of potential benefits for users and resource providers The technology is maturing quickly The business is catching up fast… … and overtaking us even faster If we do not want to end up paying a big money to big business we have to learn from them just as they learned from us lots of technology behind the clouds is the same Open Source software under our fingertips Are VMs going to solve all our problems? No. Do they have a potential to make our life simpler and computing less expensive? Yes. CERN, 30/03/ 2007 - 21