Welcome Makara!

Today, we announced that Red Hat has acquired Makara.  This acquisition is going to accelerate significantly Red Hat's offerings around Platform as a Service.  Makara includes many capabilities like auto-scaling, fantastic monitoring, and self-service portals for Java and LAMP applications in the cloud.

Combined with Red Hat's Cloud Foundations offerings as well as JBoss and Red Hat middleware platforms, we will be able to deliver the leading PaaS offering with:

• Support for your choice of programming model and language, from full JEE to Spring to Ruby to LAMP and not just a proprietary or restricted API.  This means you can run the broadest set of applications with the benefits of PaaS--including existing applications
• Support for your choice of cloud--whether private or hybrid or public

Red Hat PaaS With Your Choice of Programming Model and Your Choice of Cloud

If you'd like to learn more about Makara's capabilities, you can try them out for free online.

Welcome aboard, Makara, and I look forward to working together!

MRG 1.3 is Released

I'm pleased to announce the release of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.3.  MRG 1.3 is a significant update that features many new enhancements, including:

Messaging

MRG 1.3 offers updated clients with improved performance, new protocol version independent C++ and Python clients, Windows C++ client and additional QMF APIs.  Clustering enhancements include durable stores to provide optimized performance in clustered environments and stability improvements.

The update also enables MRG Messaging to be recognized as a supported messaging transport for JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, and offers security improvements such as SASL support for Python, including Kerberos support.


Realtime
With MRG 1.3, Realtime will move to a 2.6.33-based kernel, and will include the new Performance Counter subsystem in the kernel and the new associated perf performance tool to enable greater performance capabilities for customers.  The update also features new hardware enablement and certifications, which will incorporate a MRG Realtime hardware certification program that is expected to be introduced shortly for 1.3.


Grid
MRG Grid is a key component of Red Hat's Cloud Foundations and also for HPC markets.  The release includes new user tools, Windows Execute Node support, enhanced workflow management, resource restriction capabilities, update configuration management and new admin tools.  With these updates, customers will gain the ability to scale to tens of thousands of devices, be able to provision virtual machines, centralize configuration and management and utilize cloud spill-over capabilities.


For additional information on MRG 1.3, see the official release announcement.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Mellanox ConnectX-2 10GigE NICs Achieve New Performance Levels for Messaging, Realtime and Grid Applications

Red Hat and Mellanox announced today results from work that we've been doing together to enable RDMA over Ethernet with Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging on top of Mellanox's ConnectX-2 cards:

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX; TASE: MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end connectivity solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced that Red Hat Enterprise MRG with the open Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard and Red Hat Enterprise Linux achieved Ethernet-based data center fabric performance, delivering a 42 percent reduction in latency using Mellanox ConnectX-2 with RDMA over Ethernet (RoE), with throughputs up to 1.2 million acknowledged messages per second, with latencies in the 10 microseconds range in tests conducted by Red Hat.

We'll also be presenting details of these results at the Red Hat Summit this week in the sessions:

• Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging Performance Seminar
• Red Hat Enterprise MRG Update & Roadmap

Additionally, Mellanox will be highlighting these results this week at their booth at SIFMA.

Red Hat Summit 2010 This Week

The Red Hat Summit is taking place this week in my hometown of Boston.  The conference kicks off tomorrow, and I'll be presenting three sessions there:

• Cloud with Red Hat: What, Where, and How
• Red Hat Enterprise MRG Update & Roadmap
• Next-Generation Red Hat Management Tools for the Datacenter & Cloud

I'll also be meeting customers and partners at our Systems Management VIP lounge and other events.  I'm looking forward to seeing some of you at the Summit this week!

New IBM Cloud Built on Red Hat

Today, IBM is introducing their new enterprise cloud, and they are building that cloud on top of Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.  This is yet another example of the growing number of public clouds built on and certified with Red Hat (Amazon EC2 was the pioneer in our Certified Cloud provider program).

Here's a quote from the press release:

Our decade-long partnership with Red Hat has always been focused on customer value and innovation.  Today, we are extending this partnership to include cloud computing – broadening our reach and answering the strong customer demand for cloud computing services," said Maria Azua, vice president of Cloud Computing Enablement at IBM.  "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is an optimal hypervisor technology for the infrastructure offerings on the IBM cloud."

Virtualization is one of the foundational technologies of cloud computing, so it's great to see that when it came to building its own cloud, IBM chose Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the optimal solution amongst all the available possibilities in the market.

Open Source Energy Savings with Condor

Forbes has an article today on Open Source Energy Savings using Condor.  In addition to highlighting how Condor can help with saving energy in a data center, the article features Red Hat  and our work around Condor with Red Hat Enterprise MRG a couple times:

Two years ago Red Hat  worked out a partnership deal with the university to make Condor open source using the Apache Foundation license.

and

Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, is working on combining a large collection of open source projects into a cloud provisioning and management suite. "The move to cloud computing as the next generation architecture has only been possible by integrating many of these open source projects, such as Condor," says Cormier. "It is only natural that the software for creating and managing these virtual environments come from the world of open source as well."

The energy savings policies you can implement with Condor are nice, but we see these features as truly beneficial for most enterprises as part of a cloud solution.  For example, we have added virtualization support to Condor, which can further improve power management in a cloud deployment.  Let's say you had two servers each running at 50% capacity with one virtual machine job on each of them.  You could have a Condor job which moved one of the virtual machine jobs to the other server, consolidating all work on one machine.   Then, you could have a Condor job turn off the other machine.

Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009

This Wednesday December 9, 2009, Red Hat will be hosting its Red Hat Virtual Experience event focused on cloud computing.  I have a session there in the afternoon regarding MRG:

Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG

This presentation will cover the current state of Red Hat's cloud efforts and provide technical information that details how to build a cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat's technologies and blueprints. The presentation will also provide an overview of the capabilities and features Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization jointly provide and how workload scheduling and virtualization can be used as an enterprise management platform.

There's also many other great sessions.  You can see the agenda here.

The Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 is free to attend, and you can register here.

Cloud, Utility, Grid and Other Mixed Metaphors

I've written a new blog post for press.redhat.com: Cloud, Utility, Grid and Other Mixed Metaphors.  It discusses three terms that people typically use together but are often unclear about how they fit: cloud computing, utility computing, and grid computing.  The post illustrates the differences between the concepts and also describes how they fit together by using Red Hat Enterprise MRG as an example of how to achieve all three. 

Check out the post at http://press.redhat.com/2009/06/18/cloud-utility-grid-and-other-mixed-metaphors/.

How to Upgrade a Thinkpad T60 with a Full Disk Encryption (FDE) Hard Drive and Fedora

I recently upgraded my Lenovo Thinkpad T60 with a Full Disk Encryption (FDE) hard drive, a Seagate Momentus 7200 FDE.  The Momentus 7200 FDE provides encryption directly built into the hard drive: all data written to the hard drive is automatically encrypted with a key that is generated by and stored directly in the hard drive itself and cannot be retrieved.  FDE is probably the easiest and most transparent way to protect your data in case you happen to lose or have your laptop stolen.     

I boot multiple operating systems on my laptop, and I wanted a form of encryption that was secure but would also allow me to create symbolic links between different partitions and operating systems.  So, for example, both Fedora 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 support encrypted disks via software.  But, using a FDE hard drive allows me to ensure that the entire hard drive is encrypted, while still enabling me to access transparently the different operating system partitions from each other.

I also was running out of space on my existing hard drive and wanted a solution which would allow me to migrate all of my data from my old hard drive to my new hard drive easily.  Using FDE enables that without requiring re-installation of any software in the process.

For more information on FDE with Thinkpads, see Lenovo's FAQ.

Here's how I upgraded to FDE:

Preparation Steps

1. Backup your data in case anything goes wrong!
2. Purchase a Seagate Momentus 7200 FDE hard drive.  Make sure its capacity is at least as large as your existing hard drive
   
3. Purchase a 2.5" SATA hard disk enclosure with a USB 2.0 interface.  This should cost around $15-30 and will enable you to transfer information from your old hard drive to your new hard drive.  Amazon or your local compute store should sell a lot of these
   
4. Download Fedora and create a Fedora Live CD/USB.  You will boot into this to copy data from your old hard drive to your new hard drive

Installation and Migration Steps

1. Remove your old hard drive from your laptop.  If you have a Lenovo Thinkpad T60, you can follow Lenovo's instructions for how to do this
2. Install your new Seagate Momentus 7200 FDE hard drive into your computer
   
3. Install your old hard drive into the hard disk enclosure.  Don't plug your USB hard drive enclosure into your laptop yet
4. Insert your Fedora Live CD/USB into your laptop and boot into Fedora. 
   
5. Login into Fedora and open a terminal window.  In the terminal, type  "su -" to become the root user
6. Type "fdisk -l" and note how your new hard drive is mapped as a device.  For example, on my system, this is /dev/sda
7. Plug your the USB hard drive enclosure into your laptop.  Fedora should automatically recognize and mount your old hard drive
8. Type "fdisk -l." Both hard drives should now appear.  Note how your old hard drive is mapped as a device.  For example, on my system, it is /dev/sdb
9. Directly copy all the contents of your old hard drive to your new hard drive by executing: dd if=[your old hard drive device] of=[your new hard drive device].  For example, on my system, I did dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda.  This process will likely take several hours
10. Once your copying is done, reboot your laptop.  Make sure to remove your Fedora LiveCD/USB.  You can also unplug your USB hard drive enclosure
11. Verify that you can boot into your laptop and that your operating system(s) and data are intact on your new FDE hard drive

Final Security Steps
Now that your laptop has a FDE hard drive installed, you need to finish securing it by configuring your BIOS to require a password for accessing your hard drive:

1. Reboot your laptop and enter your BIOS settings menu.  On a T60, you can do this by hitting the Blue ThinkVantage button immediately and then entering your BIOS settings
2. Go to the security settings section and enable requiring a user password for accessing your hard drive.  Type in a new user password and make sure to remember it.  From now on, when you turn on your computer, you'll have to enter this password before you can boot into your hard drive or access data on it
3. Save your settings and reboot your laptop
4. Attach your USB hard drive enclosure and delete all your old, unsecure information from your old hard drive
   

Congratulations!  You now have a fully secure, encrypted hard drive with all your data and operating system(s) on it!

Optional: Using Your Extra Space
If your FDE hard drive is bigger than your old hard drive, you will have empty space that you can use.  You have a variety of options available to you, from creating a new partition to extending existing partitions with this space.  If you use Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can use the graphical tool, GParted, to help with this.

If you happen to use LVM, GParted doesn't work with LVM yet.  In that case, you can read the Red Hat Magazine article, Tips and tricks: What is the procedure to resize an LVM2 logical volume and the ext2 or ext3 filesystem?, for how to increase the size of an LVM partition.  Note that the end of the article discusses using the command, ext2online.  That command has since been replaced by resize2fs.

Corporate, Customer, and Academic Open Source Communities for Next Generation Software

I submitted a paper for the NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability & Reusability Workshop.  I discuss some of the innovative open source models we've used to develop Red Hat Enterprise MRG:

The NSF is looking both at models of how to build sustainable cyberinfrastructure software as well as specific software that will benefit its goals like providing communities with access to a “world class high performance computing (HPC) environment.” Red Hat Enterprise MRG, a high performance distributed computing platform which integrates Messaging, Realtime, and Grid capabilities, provides both an open source model of how academic researchers, customers, and corporations can collaborate as well as powerful software infrastructure which can help the NSF meet its next-generation cyberinfrastructure goals.

For example, I discuss the partnership we have with the University of Wisconsin around Condor for Grid scheduling:

This partnership between UW and Red Hat is adding many innovative capabilities to Condor and also expanding significantly Condor's reach from research environments to enterprises. For example, Red Hat has focused on adding many capabilities which enterprises require for deployment but which are not paramount for academia. These enhancements range from new graphical management tools to enterprise maintainability to concurrency limits on scarce resources like software licenses. Furthermore, Red Hat has also focused on advancing Condor towards utility and cloud models of computing by adding capabilities like libvirt virtualization support and Amazon EC2 integration. Many enterprises are now looking at MRG and Condor for building private clouds and moving to cloud computing.

The paper also discusses how we're feeding back developments from the enterprise into academia, how we've collaborated with customers and users around AMQP and messaging, how the technologies in MRG can help the NSF meet its software goals around sustainable HPC, and so on.

You can see the submission at the NSF's site for papers.

You can also directly download a pdf of the paper from the NSF's site: Corporate, Customer, and Academic Open Source Communities for Next Generation Software.

Software is Low Latency's Weakest Link...Unless You're Running Red Hat Enterprise MRG

There's an article in today's Wall St and Technology, Software is Low Latency's Weakest Link.  The article states:

The weakest link in the low-latency value chain is older software or poorly written code, not market data feeds, lack of ultra-fast processors or older networks, according to experts at Wall Street & Technology's Accelerating Wall Street 2009 conference.

Furthermore,

"Within the applications, we see the greatest opportunity to improve latency," said Rob Wallos, global head of market data architecture at Citi during the session The Complete Low Latency Value Chain. "Hardware can give you a generic 20 percent improvement in performance, but there is only so far you can go with hardware. "

This is certainly true in general.  We have found that even moving up to exotic hardware like infiniband only provides incremental gains in performance unless you optimize your application to take advantage of that hardware.  That's why we've been working with hardware manufacturers and optimizing Red Hat Enterprise MRG for the latest hardware as well as for Linux.


For example, MRG includes RDMA drivers to achieve extremely low latency on infiniband.  Compare the results of MRG Messaging running on infiniband with standard TCP versus with our RDMA drivers:

This chart illustrates latency using 1K messages at a sustained throughput of 50,000 messages/second using MRG Messaging.  This is for fully reliable application-level latency between three peers: a producer is sending a message through a broker to a client, and that message is acknowledged back.  So, there are four network hops in this case.  As you can see with standard TCP (the red line), the latency is nothing ground-breaking at around 1 millsecond, even though we're using infiniband.  In other words, moving the application to infiniband doesn't automatically improve latency significantly.

With our RDMA drivers , however, MRG can achieve latencies an order of magnitude better--about 70 microseconds on this same particular hardware.  And, remember, this is for 1K message sizes and 4 network hops!  So, yes, it is true that in general, low latency bottlenecks are in software.  However, we have been developing MRG to take full advantage of modern hardware and also Linux, so we've pushed the bottlenecks back to the hardware domain in many cases.

I should also note that our next release of MRG will include a cross-memory driver for co-locating our messaging broker with an application client.  This would remove one of the network links for latency and should allow us to halve our latency performance.

QCon Presentation Slides For Download

I presented Next-Generation AMQP Messaging Performance, Architectures, and Ecosystems with Red Hat Enterprise MRG last week at QCon London, along with Carl Trieloff.  The talk included a detailed use case of work we've been doing with customers to build financial trading systems and stock exchanges with MRG.  Messaging deployments don't get any higher end than this, so it's an interesting study. 

In particular, we've added capabilities in MRG like LVQ, Ring Queue, and TTL so that companies can build market caches or provide updated streaming quotes directly from the messaging broker rather than build these capabilities themselves.  We've also done a lot of work to get some pretty impressive performance (e.g. fully reliable latency across three peers in around 60 microseconds).  And, of course, we support capabilities like active/active clustering for high availability and federation for disaster recovery.

Beyond the case study, we also talked about the new ecosystems that are forming around AMQP and MRG as well as new types of messaging-oriented applications people are building now.

You can download our slides from the talk here.

Introduction to Realtime Linux Slides From SCALE 7x

I presented Introduction to Realtime Linux at SCALE 7x this past weekend.  The event was great, and our Red Hat and Fedora booths both received a lot of traffic--we ran out of almost all of our give-aways the first morning!

You can download the slides I presented here.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.1 is Released

I'm pleased to announce that we released Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.1 today.  This is a significant release that adds many new capabilities and performance enhancements.  It also introduces formal support around
the Grid component and entire MRG platform for the first time (Grid was Technology Preview in v1.0).  Some of the highlights of MRG 1.1 include:

• Messaging
• Native infiniband and RDMA driver for dramatically better
  latency
• Active/Active Clustering
• Enhanced security
• Queue semantics like Last Value Queue and Ring Queue
• Native .NET client
• Improved management tools
• Increased performance
• Realtime
• Improved performance, especially on boxes with higher CPU-counts
• Improved performance tools. For example, Tuna now has the ability to write tunings to an init script once you've found an optimal tuning for your system
• Grid
• New GUI management tools
• Low latency scheduling via MRG's messaging bus
  
• Amazon EC2 support for adding capacity on-the-fly in the cloud
• Concurrency limits on any scarce resource like software licenses or database handles
• Dynamic provisioning, which enables you to mark slots as partitionable and sub-divide them dynamically so that more than one job can occupy a slot at once

You can find out more about MRG at http://redhat.com/mrg.  Also, you can read the press announcement for MRG 1.1 at http://www.press.redhat.com/2009/02/04/red-hat-debuts-enterprise-mrg-11/.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG Presentations From the 2008 Red Hat Summit

I've posted online the presentations that we just did at the 2008 Red Hat Summit about Red Hat Enterprise MRG. You can download them at:

• Realtime Linux: Who, What, When, Where and Why by Clark Williams
• Red Hat Enterprise MRG Overview by Carl Trieloff
• Dynamic Grid Computing With Red Hat Enterprise MRG & Amazon EC2 and accompanying demo video by Bryan Che

Red Hat Enterprise MRG v1 is Released

Today marks the release of version 1 of Red Hat Enterprise MRG, our high performance distributed computing platform that integrates Messaging, Realtime, and Grid technologies. Red Hat has been working across each of these technologies for years, so we're excited to be launching the initial release at the Red Hat Summit.

We've got some pretty impressive performance results, customers, partners, and use cases for MRG. For details, see:

• The official press release for MRG's release
• Official blog entries about MRG
• The Red Hat Enterprise MRG web site
  

Additionally, if you happen to be at the Red Hat Summit, we're featuring MRG pretty prominently:

• Our CEO, Jim Whitehurst, highlighted MRG Messaging and AMQP yesterday in his keynote as an example of a customer (JPMC) contributing to open source
  
• Our CTO, Brian Stevens, featured MRG in this morning's keynote
• We have several sessions on MRG
• We are doing MRG demos at the Red Hat booth in the Expo Hall
  
• Cisco is a sponsor at the Summit and is demonstrating their AON Message Bus Interconnect (MBI) solution. Cisco is debuting support for Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging in their AON MBI product at the Summit and demonstrating this in the Expo Hall.
• IBM is a sponsor at the Summit and is demonstrating their WebSphere Real Time, which is an RTSJ-compliant realtime JVM. IBM supports WebSphere Real Time exclusively on Red Hat Enterprise MRG. They have also been a strong development partner with Red Hat around realtime, and they are a winner in this year's Red Hat Innovation Awards for this work. IBM is demonstrating WebSphere Real Time in the Expo Hall.
  

Congratulations to the entire MRG team for this fantastic release!

Introducing Fedora Nightlife

I've recently started a new project at Fedora called Nightlife. Here's the text of the e-mail I sent to the newly-created Fedora Nightlife mailing list:

Fedora Nightlife is a new project for creating a Fedora community grid. People will be able to donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power. Given the large number of Fedora users, I hope that we will eventually be able to build a community grid of over a million nodes at Fedora. This will be a great example of the power of the Fedora community, give people new and meaningful ways to contribute to Fedora, advance the development of large-scale grid software, and lead to real benefits for the world.

Fedora Nightlife will leverage the Condor project, which was (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/) created and hosted by the University of Wisconsin Madison, for scheduling and harnessing donated computing power. Last year, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin signed a strategic partnership around Condor. Part of this partnership entailed releasing Condor's source code under an OSI-approved open source license. As a result, we now have Condor packaged at Fedora, and upstream development continues to happen at the University of Wisconsin repository in an open manner.

Some of the immediate next steps for Fedora Nightlife are:
-create a Wiki page for this project
-get a Condor scheduler hosted at Fedora up and running

-work out what are the requirements for a project to be able to run on Fedora Nightlife (e.g. its software must be open source, it must be safe, it should have some kind of open policy around its results, etc)

We've already started working on getting a scheduler up and running. I should have a wiki setup relatively soon so that we can start mapping out more plans there.

Then, we can focus on growing the Nightlife community of projects and solicit Fedora users to donate capacity. Hopefully, enabling donation of compute power to Nightlife can eventually become a first-boot option for Fedora installs.

I welcome everyone to contribute to and participate in the Fedora Nightlife project!

If you'd like to subscribe to the Fedora Nightlife mailing list, you can do so at https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-nightlife-list

Fedora Nightlife is going to build on the work I do in my day job at Red Hat around Red Hat Enterprise MRG--it'll be based on the same technology we use for MRG's grid capabilities. This is great for me for a couple reasons: Fedora Nightlife will be a powerful and public example of the scale that's possible with Red Hat Enterprise MRG, and the work we do to drive Nightlife/Condor to the 1 million node count will directly benefit MRG. Also, it's great to be at a place like Red Hat where I can work on my product management job and do some good in the world at the same time.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG: Red Hat, Customer-Driven Innovation, and Open Source Leadership

Red Hat has shown that open source is one of the best ways to bring customer-driven innovation and leadership to the market. Today’s announcement of Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides a perfect example of this in many respects.

Spreading the Message of Open Source and Open Standards

Red Hat Enterprise MRG includes Red Hat’s implementation of AMQP-based ( Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) enterprise messaging. Both the MRG Messaging implementation and AMQP itself highlight Red Hat’s leadership and customer-driven innovation.

Red Hat is developing its AMQP messaging implementation in various open source projects and communities. One of the most notable aspects of these communities is that there are many messaging users from financial services and other industries contributing major pieces of code. These users are working to make sure that this messaging implementation will meet their specific needs when they ultimately consume it as customers. The results of this collaboration are noteworthy: MRG Messaging provides breakthrough features and performance and can reach durable messaging throughputs two orders of magnitude higher than other solutions.

Open source developers are not alone in recognizing the value of collaborating with others. The AMQP working group, of which Red Hat is a founding member, is developing the AMQP specification to be an open, interoperable standard for messaging. This particular working group is especially effective because its membership contains not only technology companies but also many end-users of messaging technology—including several investment banking giants. Of course, all contributions in the AMQP working group are valuable, no matter who provides them. But, AMQP is developing into a broadly accepted standard in many ways because there are so many end-users working to ensure that AMQP meets their own needs. Truly, this is customer-driven innovation.

Deterministic Success

In 2005, Red Hat began working on its realtime kernel technology in response to a request by the US Navy for the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer project. Red Hat engineer, Ingo Molnar, developed a realtime patch set which brought highly deterministic response times to the Linux kernel. However, Red Hat did not just release a product around this work. Instead, Red Hat has been working and continues to work with the Linux community to bring this realtime technology into the upstream Linux kernel. To date, Red Hat has incorporated about two-thirds of its realtime code base upstream and is working to push the rest of this code upstream. One notable recent achievement was the acceptance of Ingo’s Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) into the mainline kernel this summer.

Why is Red Hat working so hard to push its realtime work into the mainline kernel? By having features implemented upstream, these capabilities “carry forward” into future versions of the kernel, so MRG Realtime has the product longevity that proprietary realtime extensions do not.

Trying to support extensions to Linux that are not accepted upstream is a losing battle. Red Hat recognized this long ago and thus pursued the long task of writing realtime extensions and pushing them upstream. Sure, this is hard work. But, at the end of the day, Red Hat will be in an optimal position to support this technology for the long term, since Red Hat wrote and led the work upstream.

Broad-Scale Innovation

Red Hat Enterprise MRG’s High Throughput Computing and grid capabilities are based on the Condor project created by and hosted at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. First developed in the late 1980’s, Condor has been under continuous active research and use and possess features and capabilities that far exceed those of any commercial, proprietary grid product. However, Condor has not seen significant industry usage to date because it does not provide all the enterprise features, manageability and supportability that customers require. For example, one of the first pieces of work Red Hat performed on Condor was to break it up from one large, statically linked program into separate RPM packages that are robust, manageable, upgradeable and can be discreetly patched.

Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin have signed a unique partnership around Condor. Under this agreement, the University of Wisconsin will release Condor’s source code under an OSI-approved open source license so that Red Hat may include Condor in its open source distributions, and Red Hat will jointly fund and staff Condor development on-campus at the University of Wisconsin.

Condor has a large community of users and researchers in the academic space. Through its agreement with the University of Wisconsin, Red Hat will be able to bring this innovation from academia to the enterprise. Furthermore, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin will work to strengthen Condor with additional features and enterprise strength and also enhance Linux for High Throughput Computing to the benefit of both scientists and enterprises. Red Hat believes that this will lead to great advances in infrastructure technology and a great partnership between industry and academia. This is the best kind of customer-driven, open source innovation of all: one that not only advances technology but improves the way we do things.

For more information on Red Hat Enterprise MRG, see here.

How to get smaller-looking fonts on Fedora 8

When I installed Fedora 8, I thought it was quite slick and impressive visually in many ways. But, there was one thing that bugged me--my fonts now looked much bigger than they did in Fedora 7. It turns out that a default install of Fedora 8 sets a high dpi for fonts. To change this and get back to smaller-looking fonts:

• Go to System->Preferences->Look and Feel->Appearance to open the Appearances dialog box
• Click on the Fonts tab
• Click on the Details... button
• Change resolution to 96 dots per inch

That's it!

Introduction to Red Hat Developer Studio Webinar

Update:
The recording for this webinar is online at http://www.info.redhat.com/forms/RHDevStudioWebinarDownloadRequest


The upcoming Red Hat Developer Studio attracted quite a bit of attention and buzz recently at JavaOne and the Red Hat Summit. Red Hat Developer Studio will be the first completely open source, Eclipse-based development environment with robust capabilities for building rich, enterprise applications. Red Hat Developer Studio also will include the new JBoss Enterprise Application Platform so that developers will have one installer that integrates all their development tools, components, and platforms with no manual configuration necessary.

If you missed out on the live demos that we did for Red Hat Developer Studio, you can check out a webinar that we're hosting 5/31 at 2:00 PM EDT:

Introduction to Red Hat Developer Studio

This webinar will introduce Red Hat Developer Studio, a new, robust, and completely open source Eclipse-based IDE for building enterprise Rich Internet Applications. Come see how to use exciting features like new JBoss Seam wizards and tools, JBoss RichFaces editors with visual previews, and robust Hibernate tooling.

HOSTED BY: Bryan Che
SPEAKERS: James Williams: Solutions Architect, Red Hat
Max Katz: Senior Systems Engineer, Exadel
DATE: Thursday, May 31
TIME: 2 p.m. EDT

Register Here to attend the webinar

If you aren't able to attend the live webinar, we plan to record it and make it available for viewing on an on-demand basis. Hope to see you there!