Speaker
Report on the impact of the activity, tool or service. This should include a description of how grid technology enabled or enhanced the result, or how you have enabled or enhanced the infrastructure for other users.
The main impact of this extension is the possibility to extend the
capacity of the grid to computers which need to run windows during
daytime for administrative or educational purposes, while keeping worker
nodes available 7x24h. Running the worker node as a virtual machine has
many advantages over other solutions: i) a well configured system has
almost unmeasurable CPU overhead in the virtual machine, ii) the system
installation of the virtual worker nodes can be the same as normal ones
thus no extra work is needed, iii) it is possible to configure the
windows desktops such that users cannot turn them off allowing the
virtual machine to run uninterruptedly and ensure the 7x24h
availability of the worker node (except for weekly updates when reboot
is needed). The supplied maintenance and update solution helps system
administrators to adapt this solution easily, since existing windows
configurations can be used without major modifications. This solution
makes it possible t
Describe the added value of the grid for your activity, or the value your tool or service adds for other grid users. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community, and the relevance for other scientific or business applications.
The main advantage of our solution is to allow the incorporation of
desktop computers running Windows operating system into the EGEE grid.
These computers run a VirtualBox virtual machine as a service, well
separated from the users. This EGEE worker node running with low
priority apart from memory consumption does not disturb the desktop
work but uses the CPU when the host is idle. The worker node uses
Virtual Private Network to connect to the grid for security reasons.
This feature is extended by an automatic torrent based windows update
system that updates all windows images from the maintained central
computer which generally required only once per week. The bittorrent
protocol enables the fast distribution of the updated windows images
which minimizes the downtime of the computer during the weekly windows
updates. It is also possible to freeze the virtual machine for the
Windows reboot time.
Abstracts for online demonstrations must provide a summary of the demo content. Places for demos are limited and this summary will be used as part of the selection procedure. Please include the visual impact of the demo and highlight any specific requirements (e.g. network connection). In general, a successful demo is expected to have some supporting material (poster) and be capable of running on a single screen or projector.
The proposed demo consists of two parts. One part is the demonstration
of the easy deployment of the windows workstations with EGEE worker
nodes running on them. It shows the deployment procedure which is
followed by demonstrating an EGEE worker node inside a local windows
workstation running jobs.
Describe the activity, tool or service using or enhancing the EGEE infrastructure or results. A high-level description is needed here (Neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references is required).
We propose a solution that allows windows desktop computers to run
7x24h EGEE worker nodes in a virtual machine. The proposed solution has
two major parts, i) an automatic (overnight) installation system that
can do the weekly automatic updates (software package management and
security updates) of the windows operating system from an up to date
central machine, ii) a configuration of the windows system that allows
the run of the worker node on a virtual machine without well protected
from
