Grid Designer's Blog

Late last year, our friends at GigaSpaces launched an open source community OpenSpaces.org with the following mission (quote from the community web site):

"OpenSpaces.org is a website sponsored by GigaSpaces Technologies and dedicated to creating and serving a community that develops and shares open source software for the OpenSpaces development framework."

For a company like ours this was a very good news. As an independent consulting firm with deep expertize in grid technologies and a whole practice dedicated to the popular GigaSpaces XAP technology, we constantly create tools, utilities and frameworks that make GigaSpaces product better and easier to use for our customers. Once the tool is created, we want to give it to the hands of all GigaSpaces users, and ideally let the users help us - and everyone else - to refine and improve the tool. OpenSpaces.org is a perfect venue for such projects.

Let's take an example - project Gigapult. If you ever had to write a bunch of scripts that start up a cluster on your Windows-based development environment, then re-write them to work on a corporate Linux-based testing lab and then do this again for a differently configured production environment, you know how frustrating and counter-productive this is. We had to do something like this last summer for a customer where the production environment wasn't even known to the developers who were creating the deployment scripts. This script-porting business led to hard-to-find bugs and delays in the production roll out.

Kirill Ishanov, the project lead, finally had enough and suggested an idea: let's make Gigaspaces configuration and bootstrapping work cross-platform, and in the process simplify the API and make the configuration files more maintainable and readable. After all, if everything else executes in the JVM, why should deployment logic be any different? Kirill explains his motivation in more details in his two blog postings, Project Gigapult and GigaSpaces Cluster Bootstrapping and Automated Testing, but this is basically how project Gigapult was born.

Today Gigapult is a JRuby-based domain-specific language designed to specify all aspects of grid configurations in a simple and intuitive way. For more information and to download the code, please, visit the project's homepage. We've used Gigapult internally on several projects now, and the technology does make life easier.

Now, along comes OpenSpaces.org and offers Gigapult the vehicle to release the technology into the hands of developers who need it most and can contribute to its enhancements going forward. Since the launch of OpenSpaces.org, Grid Dynamics opened three more active projects:

Convergence: a pluggable architecture for interoperability between computational grids and in-memory data grids capable of data-aware scheduling, with initial bindings for GigaSpaces XAP and Data Synapse GridServer

PackRat: a library that helps increase the space capacity by efficiently packing a non-indexed part of entities in binary format

OpenSpaces Binary Calculator: a tool to accurately estimate memory size required to store objects in cache

At the launch of OpenSpaces.org, GigaSpaces announced the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge. Naturally, our four projects entered the competition. And since the challenge ends today, tonight was the first beta release for all four! Nothing like a little competition to encourage the respect for deadlines... Despite today being April 1st, this is no joking matter. We want to win!

On more serious note, over the next few days I expect project leads to blog in more details about their respective projects. Meanwhile, please visit the projects, download the technology and give us the feedback - the good, the bad and the ugly so that we can make these tools better, for you and everyone else.

And please cheer for us as we await the results of the competition!

Labels: data synapse, gigaspaces, grid computing, grid consulting, grid dynamics, open source, openspaces.org, ~Victoria Livschitz