After investigating Amazon’s EC2 service, we decided to roll out PHASTGrid, our service-oriented middleware, on the cloud. And, of course, just as we went for a customer demo, Amazon had some infrastructure problems and nothing worked.

Nicholas Carr has more details on this:

• Why S3 failed

Bob Lozano of Appistry:

• Amazon S3 still Limping

Just good that we have additional resources for demoing – this time, we showed the same application running on a cluster of Playstation3…

Picture CC’ed by Reza Vaziri on flickr.

I gave some talks in Berkeley at the LBL and at NERSC. Here are the slides, along with the presenter notes so that you might be able to reconstruct what I’ve said.

Here we go:

• 1 slide per page (PDF)
• 2 slides per page (PDF)

The presentation covers the Fraunhofer ITWM, our grid projects and my work on grid scheduling. Feel free to send me an email with your questions.

Tomorrow, I will give an introductory lecture about grid technology at the TU Kaiserslautern. Here are the materials:

• Slides with notes: PDF
• Exercise sheet: PDF

Visitors are welcome, the talk will be on 11.01.07 at 10:00 in room 36/438. If the UNICORE Testgrid gets fixed today, I will also include a demo.

CACert offers X.509 certificates for free. You can use these certificates for email signing and encryption, as well as securing your server services.

The CACert can offer these services for free because it builds a web of trust: you need a CACert assurer to verify your identity. The assurer then can give you trust points, and based on your point level you’re allowed to get certificates with different trust levels. If you gather 100 points, you’re granted the assurer permissions which means that you can assure other people.

I think this is a really nice idea: CACert brings the grass-root principles of GPG to the X.509 world. Unfortunately, the browsers currently do not trust the CACert root certificate (which means you still need to confirm that you trust a certificate issued by CACert). But the process is on the way for Firefox & Co. And using CACert certificates is a better way than using your self-signed certificates anyway…

BTW, if you’re in Kaiserslautern, the CACert site lists about 25 assurer (login required) that can help you to verify your identity.

Contact me by mail: md@gonium.net. I am also gonium on IRCnet.

My CACert public key is here.

Legal mumbo-jumbo a.k.a. Impressum

German law forces me to include this stuff, so here we go:

Mathias Dalheimer
Meisenweg 2
67663 Kaiserslautern
Tel.: +49 631 31600 4484

E-Mail: md@gonium.net
Internet: http://gonium.net

Inhaltlich Verantwortlicher gemäß § 10 Absatz 3 MDStV: Mathias Dalheimer (Anschrift siehe oben)

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