Kate Keahey writes:

On behalf of the workspace team, I am happy to announce the TP 1.3 release of the Workspace Service. You can download the new release from:http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html

This release adds significant new features. First, the workspace service can now start multiple VM instances grafted off of the same VM image in one request; the VM instances can be managed as a group or individually. Second, we added accounting functionality and services allowing users to query accounting information. Last but not least, we added configuration enhancements to make service administration easier, as well as numerous functionality and usability enhancements for the client.

These new features and enhancements necessitated some WSDL changes as well as an addition of a new namespace. The current release has a technology preview status: both interfaces and implementation are likely to change to some extent.

This new 1.3 release provides a baseline for a cycle of releases that aim to break up the service into several replacable components that could be easily and/or independently used. In particular, the next releases will include the following functionality:

• the contextualization service allowing VMs to be adapted at deployment time to the context of a site, an organization, or other VMs
• the workspace pilot which can be used in conjunction with existing batch schedulers (such as e.g. PBS) to run VMs as well as normal jobs on the same cluster

These technologies are currently undergoing alpha testing by selected friendly communities. If you are interested in testing, and don’t mind a little bit of adventure, give us a call.

We welcome comments, feedback, and bug reports. Information about the project, software downloads, documentation and instructions on how to join the workspace-user mailing list for support questions can be found
at: http://workspace.globus.org/