Google Summer of Code end: code upload and acknowledgement

The Google Summer of Code 2009 final evaluation deadline is today; 19 UTC. I don’t have time to summarize my summer here now, but there are two things I want to say to the world. First, I want to thank many people for enriching my summer. Second, I would like to announce the Clobi project on Google Code.
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new system successfully tested:

Hello you out there!

I just started running the first serious test of the system I’ve developed during this year’s Google Summer of Code. If I wanted to put it in sensational words, the test could be called “Distribution of Particle Physics High Performance Computing Jobs among Multiple Computing Clouds”; just to get some readers :-) . During the test, there will be some time I just sit around and watch my monitor, so I decided to share my experience about the new system with you and keep record of the test progress within this blog post.
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CernVM: local ATLAS Software -- the clean solution

In my blog post CernVM: how to set up a local ATLAS Software Release, I presented a brutal approach how to override CVMFS (CernVM‘s filesystem with HTTP backend) to install a local ATLAS Software release. Now I worked out a very clean and smooth solution. This approach allows:

  • to use the local ATLAS Software without “hacking” anything
  • to use local software and software provided by CVMFS at the same time.


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CernVM: how to set up a local ATLAS Software Release (dirty version)

One of the main features of CernVM is its special filesystem CVMFS with http backend (based on FUSE). Using CernVM in the standard way, the different experiment softwares work out-of-the-box and are made accessible over the web via CVMFS. Although this is a great feature, I like to set up an ATLAS Software release locally — as real offline version — to be independent of the software-providing webservers.
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CernVM on Nimbus: kernel problems

In the past days I tried to set up CernVM on a Nimbus cloud to get an ATLAS Software Release (local version) running. On this way some problems came up. One of them could be solved by instructing the Xen hypervisor to choose the proper Linux kernel.
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CernVM on Nimbus/EC2: public key injection problem

Famous computing clouds like EC2 and Nimbus offer the possibiliy to inject the public part of a keypair at boot time of a VM. Then you are able to log in as root using your personal keypair. For CernVM this fails for a simple reason.
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Resize ext3 file system in loopback file

CernVM for Xen comes as loopback file, containing an Ext3 file system of about 9 GB size, whereas about 8.5 GB are free. Using this free space I tried to set up an Offline ATLAS Software Release (15.1.0). But the filesystem ran full and pacman aborted the setup. The goal is to deploy Virtual Machines of this image within the Nimbus Cloud, which currently does not support additional partitions.

So I had to increase the size of the image / loopback file and to extend the filesystem afterwards. Therefore I basically used dd and resize2fs.
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