[Saga-devel] Re: Tests for Saga-Cloud paper

[Andre Merzky]

Quoting [Katerina Stamou] (Jan 14 2009):
> 
> Dear Shantenu, Andre,
> 
> This is an update (yeah almost 24 hrs before the paper submission) of
> the progress regarding the experiments we intended to conduct with
> Saga-MapReduce in GumboCloud and LONI clusters.
> 
> In a quick chat with Shantenu yesterday afternoon, I've explained the
> necessity of turning from GumboCloud to Amazon EC2 in order to conduct
> the experiments, mainly due to the fact that the current installation
> and configuration of Eucaliptus in GumboCloud (and although Andre
> tried to fix things even at this very last moment) hasn't and still
> doesn't allow to actually utilize it even to run a simple test. The
> causes are out of my concern, and I think it was really useful that at
> least both Andre and me investigated and possibly helped to improve the
> current status of this service. Since, yesterday morning, I've been
> trying to set up an image for the Amazon EC2 in order to conduct the
> tests there. This resulted to be a more difficult effort than initially
> thought, mainly due to the fact that I had to setup everything from
> scratch, and overcome various installation hurdles with mismatching
> software versions and the like.

Katarina,

I created an Amazon image with the id ami-8bb057e2, which
should be publicly visible.  That is similar to the one
which is listed in the .saga.ini which I sent you, and used
by the SAGA aws adaptor.  That image has boost, SAGA, sshsf
etc installed (in /usr/local/packages/saga).

You should be able to use that image - so simply creating an
instance with that ami id should work.  Please let me know
if not.  (Note that I am updating that image now and then -
mostly to improve default configuration etc.)


> I'm currently at the point where everything should be set for running,
> but for some reason when the master worker launches the agents on the
> ec2 instances, it just waits there forever with no output. From the
> other side of things (inside the vm), the worker appears to be having
> some trouble. Looking more into it right now, and will send out a mail
> later or tomorrow morning for the debugging details.

Yes, please.  thanks for checking that out!


> As I had stated from the very beginning of this effort last week, I
> couldn't promise for the accomplishment of our goal, since I am really
> in Cloud Computing, as well as the relevant Saga implementations
> (Saga-MapReduce, relevant adaptors, etc) are really new and of course
> not well tested also.

Understood! :-)


> To sum up, I would like to first of all say that I'm really sorry for
> not being able to sufficiently contribute in the current effort. I
> really wish I had more time, and I know that I will have a lot of time
> in the future not only to conduct such trivial tests but also offer to
> the Saga-Cloud and MapReduce efforts regardless of this paper.
> Although, I ll keep continue setting up this image in EC2, it would be
> mythical to say that I'll manage in time to run the experiments and
> comment on them in the paper (as human-weak being I also have to sleep,
> and go to school ;-) ), and I don't know if it would be valuable for
> further efforts to report what I've done so far.

Everything helps, and is appreciated!  


> It will be a quite tough day for me today to schedule a possible
> telecon through Skype, as I have to attend several classes and decide
> eventually which one to participate, but I'll be online on aim and I'll
> keep reading emails.
> 
> Shantenu, Andre -again my apologies for missing the our final goal, I
> really did the best I could in such little amount of time.

Well, I have very bad news for you: Shantenu managed to get
us an extension until Sunday night...  So, not all is lost.

I agree with your assessement of GumboCloud: unless there is
significant improvement (IP numbers assigned, some idea why
the new image won't run, etc), we should not put more effort
in it - it has eaten up too much time already.

Best, Andre.

> 
> Best,
> Katerina
> 



-- 
Nothing is ever easy.