[Condor-users] Self-configuring Condor virtual machine appliance for Linux-on-Windows pools

["Renato Figueiredo" <renato@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Condor users,

The following may be of interest to those who want to deploy Linux Condor pools on Windows resources within or across LANs.

During the past year we have been integrating Condor and a self-configuring virtual IP networking system called IPOP into virtual machines that are very easy to deploy and manage. The system as currently packaged has the following features (see 
http://www.grid-appliance.org for more information and documentation, including easy to follow hands-on tutorials):

- It is open-source software which runs on various flavors of open-source and free-of-charge VMs for Windows/Linux/MacOS (such as VirtualBox, VMware Server, and KVM)
- Easy to deploy VM images with a tailored Debian/Condor install; they can be deployed by non-experts, typically within minutes
- Minimal configuration: just deploy managers and submit/execute nodes
and they self-configure Condor pools (with flocking) using a
distributed hash table (DHT)
- No need to allocate IP addresses to VMs - the VMs can be NATed. The system creates a virtual network which traverses NATs
- An optional keyboard/mouse activity monitor for Windows which is simple to install (to convey user interaction activity to Condor within a VM guest)
- Allows deployment of independent pools on LAN resources, or shared across multiple sites - we have a wide-area bootstrap infrastructure in PlanetLab to facilitate this

We also have a prototype integrating Hadoop, which some of you may be interested. Feel free to contact me with questions,
--rf

Dr. Renato J. Figueiredo
Assistant Professor
ACIS Lab / Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Florida
http://byron.acis.ufl.edu
ph: 352-392-6430