Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Mono, Windows Server

Brazilian Students Set Their Own Course

Mark Stone — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:05:00 GMT

I’m going to tell a story that starts in Indiana, but really it’s about Brazil.

Once upon a time “scientific computing” was nearly synonymous with “Fortran”. Today, though, just about any high level language can be used to write High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. These days that language choice also includes C#.

At Indiana University, the Open Systems Lab has pioneered work to implement Message Passing Interface (MPI) support for .Net, so that MPI applications can be written in C#. The project is MPI.Net, and you can find it on Codeplex. It is open source, about three years old, has reached a 1.0 release, and is compatible with two other important open source projects, OpenMPI and Mono. The principle developers behind the project are Andrew Lumsdaine at Indiana University and his former student, Douglas Gregor, who is now on the faculty of Rensselear Polytechnic Institute.

This is the kind of open source work that’s really exciting to see because of the way it expands choices for the developer and the end user. A C# developer should not be closed off from writing HPC applications if that’s what they want to do. And a research scientist should not have to think about whether their lab is running Linux or Windows Server. Both of these individuals are working enough layers above the operating system that somebody else’s operating system choice should not be a constraint.

So I was very excited to learn that students in Brazil at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul were doing work on MPI, and excited to talk with them about their work. One of their projects is MPI#, also open source and also hosted on Codeplex.

MPI# builds on top of the work of MPI.Net, adding some functionality not yet present in MPI.Net. Specifically, quoting from the project description:

The goals of this project would be to build upon MPI.NET in order to complement it with the features that are missing, mainly regarding collective communication. Either they could benefit from C# native support for such communication, either they could be programmed on top of the provided MPISend/MPIRecv encapsulations. C# and .NET features such as fault tolerance or dynamicity support would be studied, in other to turn the MPI# implementation robust in large, dynamic and heterogeneous platforms.

Two of the students working on MPI# are Ismael Stangherlini and Fernando Afonso. They are graduate students in computer science, working on projects affiliated with the Brazilian Interoperability and Open Source Software Development Nucleous. When I talked to them about their work on MPI# I was curious what their communication with Indiana University had been like. Their response: they had never been in contact with Indiana University; they simply downloaded the code for MPI.Net and started working on their own.

That’s the magic of open source: that they can, in fact, just download the code on their own and start coding against it. They may make an important contribution to MPI.Net. Or their code may be entirely disregarded. Or they may move on to other projects and somebody else may or may not pick up where they left off. At this stage it’s too early to tell. But the fact that all of these scenarios are possible demonstrates why, as a methodology, open source is so nimble and adaptive. A top-down product development process, or a top-down standards development process can only execute on the innovations envisioned by the few at the top, and at the speed of the slowest decision-makers in the process. But a bottom-up open source process enables every innovation that anyone at the grass roots level can see.

Two Years and Counting....

Peter Galli — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:16:00 GMT

It is two years this month since Microsoft and Novell struck their ground-breaking technical collaboration agreement, a move that has effectively ensured greater interoperability between Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

This technical collaboration has already resulted in a number of milestones, including two new offerings announced today: the availability in the first half of 2009 of an Advanced Management Pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, and a free beta download of Novell's Moonlight, a rich media application.

Some analysts, vendors and enterprises have said the company that develops effective cross-platform management tools will have an advantage and strategic differentiator over its competitors who do not. Microsoft is already doing that.

The Microsoft Operations Manger 2007 Cross Platform Extensions enable the assessment and management of Windows and Linux servers from a single, unified console, eliminating the costs and complexities of having multiple management consoles. The Advanced Management Pack extends this Linux monitoring capability.

Also, given the current tough economic environment, this solution helps reduce training costs since staff only need to be trained on one management tool for both Windows and Linux environments.

Attendees at the Microsoft TechEd EMEA conference in Barcelona earlier this month got to see a technical preview of the Advanced Management Pack, whose release will coincide with that of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

A beta of Novell's Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight, will also be released going forward as an open source plug-in for the Firefox web browser. Moonlight brings Linux-based users the same high-definition media capabilities currently available for the Windows and Apple environments.

So, expect to see a lot more solutions in the next year that promote interoperability and help ease customer pain-points across their heterogeneous environments.

Open Source Highlights at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference

hanrahat — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:32:00 GMT

At last week's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, product previews and announcements, particularly of Windows Azure, Windows 7 and Visual Studio Team System 2010, generated a lot of buzz. Throughout the week, an important undercurrent to that story was Microsoft's engagement with the open source community and its support for open source developers.

Certainly one of the open source highlights for the week was Miguel de Icaza's presentation, "Mono and .Net." In spite of arriving on time for the session, I wound up viewing it from the second overflow room. Miguel talked about innovations on which the Mono community has focused recently, including their embedded C# compiler. His game demos of the technology were fun and amazing to watch. You can see them for yourself here.

Members of my team spent the month leading up to the conference developing three demonstrations of Windows Azure's ability to support open source developers and open source applications. We ran all three at the Open Source pedestal in the Microsoft booth and each was highlighted in a session during the conference.

One of the demos shows how developers can use Eclipse to create applications and deploy them as Azure services. It relies on an Eclipse community plug-in "Emonics" for displaying C# syntax and a "proof-of-concept" Azure plug-in we created for building and deploying the application. This demo was highlighted in Steve Marx's presentation, "Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service," which you can find here.

The second demo shows how an open source application can access services from Azure. In this one, we chose the popular PHP application Gallery and show how it can store, retrieve and modify photos as binary large objects (BLOBs) in the cloud. To produce this demo we wrote two small modules, one to create wrappers that represent the BLOB REST API as PHP objects and another to create an Azure subclass with inheritance from the Windows NT Platform class.

We created the third demo to illustrate how an open source developer can use OpenID to authenticate users from an Azure service. For this one, we modified a demo blog service (based on BlogEngine.net) and gave users the option of authenticating through either OpenID or Live ID.

Both the Gallery and OpenID demos were highlighted in Daniel Wang and Stefan Schackow's presentation, "Cloud Computing: Programming in the Cloud." You can find Daniel and Stefan's presentation here.

The excitement that PDC produced was remarkable. I moved through a steady stream of developers for four days, all of us sustained it seems by tables of fruit, powerbars and various forms of chocolate. I enjoyed meeting and talking with many of the attendees and as always appreciate how much I learn in those conversations.

I want to thank Steve Marx, Daniel Wang and Stefan Schackow for sharing the stage with us. Kudos to Hank Janssen, Anandeep Pannu, Garrett Serack and Joel Penner for creating the Azure demonstrations we used throughout the week. And a tip of my hat to Miguel for making the week so fun.