Happy fourth of July everyone! I'll miss the fireworks this year, although from the Miami weather report it looks like they'll be rained on anyway. I'll just delay my fireworks extraveganza until the 14th - Bastille day in France.

This week was a calm week - not a lot of touring around, revisited some places thast weekend and posted new pictures, plan on watching the Fira Montjuic again tonight - just have to get there early, there is a fashion show going on, and a fair bit of the street and area around the fountain is gated off.

Gabriel discovered a new market near us (well about 6 or more blocks, but closer than the Boqueria) that I plan to go to tonight before the fountain. Supposed to be nice and cheap.

Report

Accomplishments

Judit gave me a couple of hours of training in Paraver - quite the complex tool set. Spending some quality time with a small trace of WRF I have from the tutorial. Still waiting for Access to learn how to run my own traces.

Installed WRF on the VM that I built - that was a pain. Turns out if you are installing WRF in Ubuntu linux you need a scripting utility called m4 installed - or the whole thing bombs. It will give you file not found errors - and in the compile logs does not relly give you an error about that not being present. It is actually buried in the log file! what a pain. That took a couple of days to track down - I thought I was missing a file. I can now compile and run WRF and have run the first real test in the test suite. 

AFter that I installed WPS - another useful WRF tool, that went well.

Sadly the visualization tools, while free, require signing up to get a login - I'm not sure why- but without the free sign up, and the admins approval of your login, you can't the tools. A tad bit paranoid I'd say. So now I wait to try the visualization end of things. Also looking at the output format from wrf as a side adventure.

Downloaded the WRF Portal program from wrfportal.org, so far so good - at least it installed clean (after installing ant) and seems to be working, I need to do more configuration though.

Plans

Grid School next week at Sofia Antipolis. Turns out the tour d'France is going through there the day I arrive - I expect a it of chaos. We even have word the airport is expecting to have significant delays - fortunately after I get there (I hope). 

So the plans can be summed as learn grid tools, enjoy Nice and the surrounding area.

Summaries/Critiques

Cloud Computing and Grid Computing 360-Degree Compared by  
Ian Foster, Yong Zhao, Ioan Raicu, Shiyong Lu

I found the paper to be a well written overview of both grid and cloud and a reasonable comparison between them. He identified the strengths of each and the weaknesses too. Some of the observations he made on the uses of clouds vs grids were accurate from a business point of view, although I think that he assumed equal access to both a grid and a "cloud grid" in his comparisons. For those without access to a grid HPC on a cloud grid may be acceptable. I did rather like his observation on the future of the desktop cpu, where will computing be when you have 1000 cores on a chip and a 8 cpu system - what then for the grid and cloud? He did point out that the grid is a much more mature organization with the appropriate tools and more. From a business point of view at what point do you release control completely to an external agency? He hinted at some of the data tracking and provenance issues - with new US rules on controls, clouds just aren't able to meet those requirements.
 
All in all a great overview paper (and quite the reference paper list to read)

Ontological Directory and Directory Load-Balancing for Large-Scale Grids

Juan Li

This paper is a reasonable discussion of overlay networks and the problems involved in resource discovery and routing.