Accessing, running and sharing applications and data presents researchers with many challenges. Cloud computing and social networking technologies have the potential to simplify or eliminate many of these challenges. Cloud computing technologies can provide scientists with transparent and on-demand access to applications served over the Internet in a dynamic and scalable manner. Social networking technologies provide a means for easily sharing applications and data. In this paper we present an on-line/on-demand interactive application service. The service is built on a cloud computing infrastructure that dynamically provisions virtualized application servers based on user demand. An open source social networking platform is leveraged to establish a portal front end that enables applications and results to be easily shared between researchers. Furthermore, the service works with existing/legacy applications without requiring any modifications.

In this paper we present a new programming model for the Cell BE architecture called CellFS. CellFS aims to simplify the task of managing I/O between the local store of the synergistic processing units and main memory of the Cell. The CellFS support library provides the means for transferring data via simple file I/O operations therefore eliminating the need for programmers to handle DMA transfers explicitly. The CellFS programming also provides overlap between code execution and data transfer by means of a deterministic, lock-less concurrency model.

Xcpu is a new process management system that is equally at home on clusters and grids. Xcpu provides a process execution service visible to client nodes as a 9p server. It can be presented to users as a file system if that functionality is desired. The Xcpu service builds on our earlier work with the Bproc system. Xcpu differs from traditional remote execution services in several key ways, one of the most important being its use of a push rather than a pull model, in which the binaries are pushed to the nodes by the job starter, rather than pulled from a remote file system such as NFS. Bproc used a proprietary protocol; a process migration model; and a set of kernel modifications to achieve its goals. In contrast, Xcpu uses a well-understood protocol, namely 9p; uses a non-migration model for moving the process to the remote node; and uses totally standard kernels on various operating systems such as Plan 9 and Linux to start, and MacOS and others in development. In this paper, we describe our clustering model; how Bproc implements it and how Xcpu implements a similar, but not identical model. We describe in some detail the structure of the various Xcpu components. Finally, we close with a discussion of Xcpu performance, as measured on several clusters at LANL, including the 1024-node Pink cluster, and the 256-node Blue Steel InfiniBand cluster

Summary form only given. This paper describes the use of the "Plan 9 from Bell Labs " distributed operating system as a grid computing infrastructure. In particular it compares solutions using the de facto standard middleware toolkit for grids, Globus, to an environment constructed using computers running the Plan 9 operating system. These environments are compared based on the features they offer in the context of grid computing: authentication, security, data management, and resource discovery.