rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for October, 2005
October 17, 2005 at 3:58 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
Our main push right now (aside from getting our Professional version out the door) is to finalize the specs for the next release of the Digipede Network: version 1.2.
There will be a few API improvements, many performance enhancements, native support for .NET 2.0, and more.
You might ask, what happened to version 1.1? Version 1.0 of the Digipede Networkis built on .NET 1.1. The next version will be built natively on .NET 2.0. Naturally, this version would have been version 1.1, but we felt this might confuse people. As the change from .NET 1.1 is a significant one to our customers, we felt that it might be easier just to skip 1.1.
Less confusing? I hope. Still confusing? Maybe. Misleading? I hope not.
I have always been very strict about proper use of version numbers and skipping a minor version could be perceived at a marketing ploy. That isn’t why we’re doing it, although I hope that our decision is viewed as slightly whimsical, if anything.
BTW: I was really hoping that the Visual Studio RTM would have been out last week. I need to get my development team using all of the new tools and would just as soon avoid an unnecessary tool install/upgrade cycle.
Tags: .NET, Digipede, grid
October 12, 2005 at 1:33 pm · Filed under .NET
Update: I think that Channel 9 is jumping the gun. I hear now that the RTM date is as of yet unknown.
2 more days to the RTM:
Channel 9 says the RTM will be available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads this Friday (October 14th).
And 26 more days to the launch:
We’ll be at the November 7th launch in San Francisco to show off our product with VS2005 and .NET 2.0!
This product launch has been eagerly awaiting by a very large group of people. We’re excited too. Drop by our booth at the SF launch and see us.
Tags: .NET, vs2005
October 12, 2005 at 8:16 am · Filed under .NET
I have completed my first litmus test for my planned approach for our .NET 2.0 port: that it is possible for a .NET 1.1 WSE 2.0 Web services client to interact with a ASP.NET 2.0 WSE 2.0 Web service. I am happy to report that this has worked with no trouble; however, there is a gotcha here for those intending to support VS2003’s “Add Web Reference” feature:
By default, ASP.NET 2.0 generates WSDL based on the SOAP 1.2 specification. VS2003 can only interpret the WSDL based on the SOAP 1.1 specification. I say “by default” because I assume this can be overridden; however, I may be wrong.
In terms of my overall progress, I have converted libraries, WSE clients and services, ASP.NET projects, ADO.NET clients, and Windows Services. There have been no real stumbling blocks, though I expect that the greater work will be integrating all of these new tools into our release processes.
One issue is that ASP.NET 2.0 assemblies are all compiled into an App_Code.dll. Anywhere that static references to ASP.NET assemblies exist (e.g., in the web.config file) need to be changed. This was the case for us in two sections: custom configSections and a WSE securityTokenManager. In both cases, I simply needed to change the 2nd argument in the standard full assembly name from the old simple assembly name (e.g., MyWebServices) to App_Code.
The other issue was that I had to #if out references to the PreEmptive.Dotfuscator.ObfuscationAttributes namespace as these attributes are built-in to .NET 2.0.
Other than that, everything is AOK.
BTW: I’m sticking with VSS 6 and not getting into Team System for now. I consider this a completely separate porting issue that I’ll get into later this year.
Tags: .NET, Digipede, vs2005
October 10, 2005 at 10:52 am · Filed under Grid Computing
Dan’s post (Grids? Clusters? Distributed Computing?) explains why we refer to the Digipede Network as “Grid Computing for Windows“.
Several speakers at the recent Microsoft eScience Workshop defined Grid as well and many others steered away from the term altogether. As Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman are generally credited with the definition of this term (from his book), there are many people who think of Grid as being exactly Globus. To these people, Grid means large, complex, multi-organizational, cross-platform (mostly Unix and its pretenders) computing systems that integrate sensors and visualization with distributed computing power.
As we are trying to bring simplification to this kind of computing, I wanted to steer away from calling our product a “Grid“. I truly thought it would be more confusing if we did so; however, I was wrong.
We found again and again that when we described our product we often ended with “you know, like a computing grid“. That was when people began to get it.
So, we decided to go directly to the punchline.
Of course, we have also had a few people ask us: your whole company is based on a grid (i.e., tabular UI) control? 😉
Tags: .NET, Digipede, grid
October 10, 2005 at 6:44 am · Filed under .NET
After some discussion about the timing of a move to .NET 2.0/VS2005, we have decided to take the plunge and natively build for .NET 2.0 for (a currently planned) release in November. The main reason we have delayed in this decision is that we need to continue supporting current and prospective customers who, for various reasons, are not ready to move from .NET 1.1.
There are a couple of things about our product that make this a bit more complicated than simply upgrading all of our VS2003 projects.:
1. We offer a .NET API to our product. Since we are committed to supporting .NET 1.1, we will have to continue maintaining a 1.1 version of the API’s main assembly.
2. The Digipede Network can instantiate distributed objects, serialize them, and return them to the caller of the API. If the caller is using the .NET 1.1 CLR then the serializing assembly cannot be running in a newer CLR; otherwise, deserialization errors will occur. To solve this problem we need to select the proper CLR based on characteristics of the caller (or, more practically, on configurable requirements).
These details are worked out (and basically functional), so what is left is integrating the new tools into development, build, and test. We have already tested it all against .NET 2.0, so there is little concern there. The CLR team has done a great job on compatibility.
Integrating the tools is (mostly) straightforward, but includes nant, NDoc, ResHacker, FxCop, Dotfuscator, NUnit, NCover, XHEO, Infragistics, NDepend, and Resharper.
Some of these are critical for our commercial release and some can be dealt with later.
I’ll continue to post about this port with any gotchas I come up with.
Tags: .NET, clr, grid, vs2005
October 9, 2005 at 9:46 am · Filed under Grid Computing
Savas Parastaditis gave a talk on his White Dwarfs application and the WS-GAF work he did while at University of Newcastle. He had the worst timeslot of anyone in the workshop: It was after dinner and we were all getting pretty tired. The workshop had started over 12 hours before (and aside from a few breaks) was packed with content. Anyway, Savas did a good job with his talk. The White Dwarfs application is an interesting application that brought together existing data to help astronomers search for white dwarfs.
I chatted with him for a few minutes about MEST: like many, I am eager to read his coming paper (or book?). He has gotten me thinking about a mechanism that we use to simulate MEST-like behavior in a world where the clients are not services (nor are they assumed to be reachable from the service). Unfortunately, I can only guess if such methods for simulation are MEST- or XEST (i.e., something else altogether). I will blog my thoughts on this and see what Savas as to say about it.
I had been in contact with the Savas before eScience and was happy to finally meet him: he is a real nice guy.
Tags: .NET, grid
October 9, 2005 at 9:44 am · Filed under Grid Computing
I am getting behind in my blogging: I missed the second day of the eScience event, took most of Friday off and went camping with my family. What a beautiful weekend!
Here is the start of my (short) wrap-up to the event.
Marvin Theimer, architect for the new offering (I believe it is now called Compute Cluster Server) from the Microsoft HPC group, stood in for Kryil Faenov to talk about Microsoft’s view of the changes coming in the HPC industry. For version 1.0, they seem to be more and more focused on what they called the “personal supercomputer.” – an 8 or 16-node cluster in a single box complete with a dedicated head-node loaded with applications specific to a particular vertical. Think the Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics.
I think this is a reasonable place for them to focus: there certainly is a market for this pre-packaged hardware / software solution.
Tags: .NET, grid
October 7, 2005 at 7:31 am · Filed under Grid Computing
Patrick Hogan showed off the work his group is doing at NASA: World Wind. Think Virtual Earth and Google Earth packaged in a slick smart client layered with scientific data fetched from data warehouses from around the world. Check it out here: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/download.html
He really wowed the audience with:
- Multiple satellite views
- USGS topographic maps
- Place information (the kind of stuff you see on a political map)
- Elevations in relief
- Seismic / weather data
And more, all in a zoomable 3d view off the earth.
Plus a version of it is available for Windows Mobile!
Probably the most impressive part was that it was all done in one year by one programmer straight out of college. That says a lot about the productivity one can achieve with the Microsoft tools (it is all .NET and DirectX).
Apparently the CEO of Google praised the NASA group for the accomplishment. It took them 30 programmer years to achieve the same result.
Tags: .NET, grid
October 6, 2005 at 4:17 am · Filed under Grid Computing
Dan Werthimer talked a bit about SETI@Home and BOINC.
Â
This is a very well-known project run from my alma-mater.
Â
He talked about several ways over time that people have tried (or suggested trying) to tell extra-terrestrial life that we are here. None of these were funded. He makes the point that there was no funding until Voyager, which he called “Porno in space”. If you don’t get this, look for the plaque on the side of Voyager (or recall V’ger).
Â
His whole talk was pretty amusing. A mix of SETI science and humor.
Tags: grid
October 6, 2005 at 1:34 am · Filed under Grid Computing
David Lifka leads the Cornell Theory Center (i.e., the CTC). If you are (still) questioning the viability of Windows for cluster computing, you should check out the work they have done. They offer a free workshop – I went last year. Interesting content plus you get to check out their visualization cave!
He spoke about what they do there and more of the story: Windows, IIS, SQL Server, Web services, Visual Studio, . . . All together this makes an excellent platform for computing.
David brought up the problem with network load balancing (NLB) applied to distributed computing. It is transaction based. If transactions/second go down, then the server is loaded higher. Long running tasks (e.g., a large BLAST search) will have a low t/s resulting in more tasks assigned to that machine. Then you get a grinding halt. This approach works well for short transaction-based requests (think Web-sites) and poorly for computation-intense applications.
He brings this up for a good reason: many people think that application distribution can be achieved by simply implementing NLB across a set of Web servers. The answer, as is often the case, is: “well, under some circumstances, maybe.”
He also uses an alternate to the term “grid”: “Heterogeneous Wide Area Distributed Computing”. Meaning, a Grid that isn’t necessarily based on Globus.
Tags: grid, Microsoft
« Previous entries ·
Next entries »
About me
Main feed
Email subscriptions