All the electric power generated from renewable energy is good – no additional CO2 is produced. Saving energy in general is also a good idea – what you don’t consume, you don’t need to produce. But energy savings require you to understand your own energy consumption – you can’t improve what you can’t measure. A simple energy cost monitor is available for 10 Euro, but it requires you to plug it into different appliances in order to figure out what a specific device consumes. And only the more expensive ones log the power consumption over time, which is pretty interesting.

An alternative to the simple energy meters are smart meters. In Germany, utility providers need to offer their customers the replacement of old (typically black) meters with shiny new digital “smart” meters. Actually, there is nothing smart about them – they just transmit the energy consumption of the household via powerline or other technologies to the utility provider. The utility provider does not need to visit the household in order to get the reading. And, in some cases, customers can have a look at the realtime energy consumption of their household.

The benefit of the realtime data is that you can assess the impact of your actual energy use very quickly. Google.org is offering the PowerMeter, which works for example with the smart meters offered by Yello Strom. An interesting open-source alternative is the Flukso.

The Flukso is a little WLAN router with some additional circuits to measure your power consumption. You install it in your breaker box. Depending on the configuration of your breaker box you need one or three current clamps. These clamps just go around the cables that supply your household – it is not necessary to re-cable the breaker box. I have a three-phase supply, so my installation consists of three current clamps and the Flukso itself. David Rowe has a nice writeup on the installation.

The Flukso then measures the power and transmits the data over the WLAN to the Flukso website. Once you’re logged in you can see your own energy consumption as a realtime graph. It is quite fascinating to find out how your energy consumption is composed. Here is one of my charts:

The graph shows time on the X-axis and my energy consumption in Watts on the Y-axis. The peak (1) shows that I was getting up in the middle of the night, preparing some tea and switchin on my computer. I had a pretty decent jet lag that night. In the morning I got up again around 8:00 (2). Apparently I used my coffee machine and switched on some lights, but I left shortly afterwards. The regular power consumption (3) originates from my fridge which draws power in regular intervals. Around 18:00, I got home again, switched on lights, prepared tea etc (4).

The graph is very interesting and really helps to improve your energy usage. But it also scares me – as I demonstrated above, a lot of information is stored in such a graph. Honestly, I don’t want my utility provider to know this. And I definitely do not want Google to know that much about my life. Or would you like to see advertisements for sleeping pills after a night of jet lag?

The picture at the top is CC-BY BK59 on flickr, thanks!

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.

Just some notes and links to remember when deploying applications on EC2:

• Server Setup: Setting up an Amazon EC2 server with Fedora Core 5
• Retrieve instance information from within the instance: Using instance data
• Dynamic DNS update from within an instance: Updating dynamic DNS on Amazon EC2
• Ruby bindings for EC2: Amazon Web Services EC2 Ruby Gem

The photo was taken by (: Petra :) and CC’ed 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.

Ever wanted to know what this grid computing thing is about? What you can do with it? Then watch my grid computing introduction.

I present my personal view on grid computing, mixed with an example and the grid computing definition as presented in “The Anatomy of the Grid” (by Foster, Kesselman and Tuecke). If you’re interested in more details about grid computing, I would like to encourage you to have a look at this paper.

You can watch the movie by clicking on the YouTube picture above. I also provide the raw movie here for download:

• QuickTime format
• IPod format

I would love to receive some feedback, both on the content and on the technical aspects of the movie.

While UNICORE is an easy-to-use grid middleware, I found that it lacks an introduction that helps newbies to get started. So Dirk Petry and I wrote a little introduction.

UNICORE provides “UNIform access to COmpute REsources”. Users can utilize a java client to access supercomputing resources, e.g. the JUMP system at the research center Jülich in Germany.

The document starts with an architectural overview of UNICORE and explains the relation of the services as well as they interact with each other. The second part walks you through a basic installation of a UNICORE site. We link to the existing UNICORE documentation whenever possible.

This document is not an in-depth guide to UNICORE, but complements the existing UNICORE documentation. We hope it is useful for system administrators and researchers starting to work with UNICORE. We appreciate any comments.

Download PDF: A practical Introduction to Unicore

If you want to cite, please use the following form:
Mathias Dalheimer and Dirk Petry: A practical Introduction to UNICORE. Technical Report, Fraunhofer ITWM, Kaiserslautern, Germany, 2006.

Please note that some UNICORE experts are checking the document for mistakes. We will update the document if needed.

This GGF, I really feel the schizophrenic nature of standardization work:

1. As a student, I have to throw away all cool features of my scheduler. Ouch. It hurts.
2. As co-chair of the OGSA-RSS Working Group (Open Grid Services Architecture – Resource Selection Services), I have to go for a simple interface that can be mapped to a lot of projects.

I feel that I have to think about it for a time until I’ll be happy with it.

I’m on the road again, towards Athens for GGF 16. Two scandals so far:

1. Lufthansa has stopped giving you metal cutlery. I can’t believe it.
2. Global Grid Forum and Enterprise Grid Alliance will merge.

Lufthansa now gives you those stupid plastic spoons etc. that tend to break during your meal. This sucks.

I don’t yet know what to think about the GGF-EGA merger: On one hand, it may be a good thing to join the forces of the two organizations in order to move to standardization. On the other hand, there will be more industry people arround and I am concerned that scientists will not be able to allocate the same amount of resources for their contribution to the standardization process.

I am also wondering why the news are not on the websites so far. I received a public email, so I think it is safe to write about it.