[workspace-user] Questions about the Workspace Marketplace

[Kate Keahey]

Lisa C Childers wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Apr 2007, Kate Keahey wrote:
>> Lisa C Childers wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Firstly let me say that I am enjoying reading the papers produced by the
>>> workspace dev team.  Really nice work.
>>>
>>> I am interested in experimenting with the workspace service and have a few
>>> questions regarding the Workspace Marketplace located at
>>> http://workspace.globus.org/vm/marketplace.html
>>>
>>> 1. Do you have plans to release new images, and if so what will they
>>> contain and when do you anticipate they will be available?
>> We do plan to make more images available as our work progresses. At this
>> point, we are working with several different communities, mostly on
>> images for their applications, but also on images for service support
>> (i.e., edge services, etc.) and base images.
> 
> Can you please provide this newbie with more detail regarding what is
> meant by "edge services" and "base images".  There seems to be an
> architecture implied here that I don't yet have in my head.

Edge Services is an OSG term essentially describing service nodes of a 
cluster (e.g., a compute element node running GRAM is an edge service). 
Base images is a term typically used to describe an image with a very 
rudimentary configuration (e.g., simply configured with Linux).

> 
> Also, may I suggest that a next image include a basic GT4 deployment for
> potential users (like me!) who want to play around with virtual Globus
> environments.  It would be good to know if and when such an image will be
> available, otherwise I will end up building one myself.

By all means feel free to build one, right now the only images we have 
that are close to that are the workspace client images.

> 
>>> 2. Is this Marketplace intended to hold images generated from the
>>> community as well, or is it limited to the products of workspace
>>> developers?
>> We'll be happy to accept contributions from others as long as they are
>> accompanied by workspace meta-data (i.e., an appliance rather than just
>> a VM image), tested in practice, and useful to the scientific community.
>> Note that the appliance formats are evolving rapidly so realistically
>> the marketplace will see a lot of revisions.
> 
> Cool, thanks.  Good to know!
> 
> Lisa
> 
> 

-- 

Kate Keahey,
Mathematics & CS Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Computation Institute, University of Chicago