MeSsAGE Lab's grid computing middleware, Nimrod, is now Cloud enabled. Cloud computing is a highly touted new paradigm building on diverse technologies such as virtualisation and web services, and having much in common with Grid computing. Clouds offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and rely on economies of scale to make cloud services attractive compared with in-house infrastructure.
Nimrod allows users to run computationally expensive experiments over widely distributed computers, making it possible to explore complex problems in a range of disciplines from quantum chemistry to finance. Originally developed in the Co-operative Research Centre for Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC) in 1994 it has been continuously developed and extended by researchers in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash.
For researchers using the Nimrod toolkit this means access to a cheap and large new resource ideally suited to parameter studies. Professor David Abramson describes the new functionality as, "an exciting development for high-throughput computing (HTC) allowing Australian researchers access to computational resources of unprecedented size."
A prototype Nimrod/G cloud interface was developed as an advanced project by Monash Faculty of IT students Benjamin Dobell, Aidan Steele, Ashley Taylor and David Warner under the supervision of Prof. Abramson and researchers within MESSAGE Lab. Lab member Blair Bethwaite said of the project, "I am very impressed with the progress made by the group in such a short time. It serves not only as a testament to the extensibility and quality of engineering in our middleware but also speaks volumes as to the quality of graduates the faculty is producing."
The current work has focused on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Prof. Abramson explains, "EC2 represents the most generic definition of cloud computing in the wild and therefore most appropriate for supporting HTC - especially where legacy codes are concerned, Nimrod can now parallelise programs developed on a standard Linux or Windows platform with very little effort on behalf of the scientist/developer."
Visit the MeSsAGE Lab website for more information.