Computer Science Camp for Kids

R2AD personnel are preparing to teach a computer programming camp for kids this summer (July 2016).  Details, as they progress, are available at the FOGE Event page.

Here's the current description of the course:

Learn about computers, inside and out!  This camp covers computer history coupled with programming in Basic.  Students will be able to understand the potential of programming and will learn techniques which they can apply in other FOGE courses that incorporate programming (i.e. robotics).  Apple ][ computers will be available for demonstrations as part of the history aspect of this unique course.

We'll be using, to some extend, the Small Basic book available from Computer Science For Kids.

If you would also like to volunteer, please contact R2AD or FOGE today! 

The 2016 DI2E Plugfest planning is gearing up! Join R2AD and many other industry partners as we team together to develop needed applications and services to improve interoperability through standards, cooperation, and hard work!

R2AD plans to code and integrate using the Intelligence Community Identifier (IC-ID) specification, One of our focus items this year. 

Shink your Linux VM using UNIX and VMware commands

There are many reasons why you would want to shrink the overall size of your VM.  Here are a few: Conserve Disk Space (the final frontier); Fit the VM on a CD or a DVD; reduce time to transmit the VM over the network; reduce overall backup time.
This entry provides a summary of a basic technique that we use.  I'm sure this is documented elsewhere, however sometimes unique perspectives can be illuminating.

Open two terminal windows and use sudo or become root.  In one terminal, issue the dd command shown in the image below to create a huge file in /tmp to fill up the disk space with zeros. Zeros are highly compressible.  You can repeat the command or change the arguments, depending on the size of the volume.

• dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/full bs=100M count=500

While that is running, check the progress using the df command in the other terminal window. When the disk is full, stop the dump command (ctrl-c) and then remove the huge temporary files and then shutdown your system. 

Next, run the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe utility to decompress and shrink your virtual disk volume.  So first use the -d option, passing in the name of the VMDK file, and when that is completed, run again with the -k option.  In our case, the resultant OVA file went down from 17GB to 1.3GB.  Cool Bytes.
 

(Windows Example is referenced below)

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware>"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe"
VMware Virtual Disk Manager - build 1895310.
Usage: vmware-vdiskmanager.exe OPTIONS |
Offline disk manipulation utility
  Operations, only one may be specified at a time:
     -d                   : defragment the specified virtual disk. Only
                            local virtual disks may be defragmented.
     -k                   : shrink the specified virtual disk. Only local
                            virtual disks may be shrunk.
   

R2AD attending DoDIIS Worldwide 2015

DoDIIS WorldWide 2015...
R2AD is supporting ONI at DoDIIS WorldWide 2015!  Stop by the JDISS booth (#232) to see great cloud related demonstrations.    R2AD has been busy migrating modern applications such as FOM and TMSWeb as new Intelligence Mission Applications (IMAs) into the JDISS portfolio. Learn more at the DoDIIS Worldwide.

OGF-43 and GENI Engineering Conference 22...

R2AD is attending and participating in the Open Grid Forum 43 (OGF-43), the GENI Engineering Conference 22 and US Ignite Application Summit.  It is hosted by the George Washington University, March 23-26, 2015.
GENI Engineering Conferences (GEC) are regular open working meetings where researchers, developers, industrial and international partners and the GENI Project Office meet to advance infrastructure planning and prototyping for the GENI project. The GEC focuses on how to design and build a suite of infrastructure that can best inspire and support creative research. The conference is open to all.
R2AD is a active member of the Open Grid Forum. 
If you're interested in future cloud and computer networking, check out the 22nd geni conference agenda!

Google I/O in DC

We are participating in the Google I/O Extended DC #IOxDC 2014 event being held at the Artisphere in Arlington, VA.  A live feed is shown from Google I/O and there is a Google Wear hack-a-thon.  Android Coding!  Link: Google Developer Group Meetup

Cloud Expo East 2014

R2AD participated in Cloud Expo East 2014, specifically Big Data Expo 2014.  This event was well attended by both cloud enthusiast and industry providers. The event had a lot of focus on Cloud APIs, noSQL databases, and abstraction layers to make Big Data easier.

Cloud APIs are going to get more attention in the near future, especially as organizations realize the need for interoperability and also portability of their "cloud code".  

Note that Docker 1.0 was just released as well and was talked about during the conference...this is a way to achieve application portability between the clouds.

Internet of Things (IOT) was also had powerful  presence at the conference. R2AD is looking forward to IOT hardware and application development in the years to come!

SNIA Cloud Plugfest

R2AD is attending the Storage Developers Conference (SDC) and participating in theSNIA Cloud Plugfest this week in sunny Santa Clara, CA.

We are working to extend the capabilities of the Android Cloud Client - see details at cloud.r2ad.net.

R2AD participated in the National Day of Civic Hacking this weekend!
Specifically, we participated at at the City of Baltimore location, which was held at Advertising.com's nice offices next to the Inner Harbor.

We put together a plan to process airline flight data and submitted our project for the competition: The main goal is to collect code, data, documentation, and presentations that we can share as an example of how to take advantage of Big Data.

We got great help from Vlad Korolev, which really enabled us to meet our goals. All the files are being stored on github. We'll probably publish a web page to, using the URL: www.planebigdata.com sometime in the near future.

In a short order, we (mostly Vlad) was able to:

• Code up a flight KML translator
• build up a maven project file (pom.xml)
• setup an project on CloudBees to have Jenkins kick off the maven build periodically
• Registered the domain: planebigdata.com
• Coded up the converter which takes the KML data and outputs a tab separated data file. This then would be used by future Map/Reduce code.
• Present our progress brief at the end. The review of event participants at Baltimore was broadcasted live via Google.

Next, we'll continue to work the site and get more folks involved to help out.
The Civic Hacking event was a great and interesting opportunity which R2AD was proud to be a part of.

Cloud Camp New York 2013

R2AD will be presenting at the Cloud Camp in New York this summer (11 June 2013). If you are interested in joining, please visit the Cloud East Cloud Camp Agenda site . We presented on "Actionable Cloud Standards" which highlighted a number of  emerging cloud standards and implementations. We'll review OCCI, CDMI, and others!

R2AD is working on a new Cloud Specification through the OASIS Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP) Technical Committee. CAMP shall define models and protocols in support of the management of cloud applications in a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model.

The charter for the committee is available and the first Face 2 Face has just occurred in Santa Clara, CA. Meetings are being held weekly with strong support from a number of companies. See the announcement for more information.
------ R2AD, LLC: Enabling Cloud Interoperability ------
Tweet CAMP
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R2AD was proud to sponsor and support the Federation of Galaxy Explorers (FOGE) at the annual Galaxy Ball.

FOGE is a nonprofit organization that promotes the exploration of science and technology to students of all ages. Schools and organizations from all over the country have set up Mission Teams to inspire kids to learn more about space science, engineering, Earth science, rocketry and space citizenship.

R2AD would like to thank all the R2AD employees for their support of this event and the Space Education goals of FOGE. Volunteering is a great way to participate and help the advancement of space education.
Skyward!

Cloud DC - PaaS

Both OpenShift and Cloud Foundry offer an open source implementation of Platform as a Service (see slides: http://tinyurl.com/osspaas)

I attended the 10 May 2012 Cloud DC users group. Red Hat was there presenting OpenShift. After the hour long talk, I went home, and in 20 minutes created an OpenShift account (http://openshift.com) and created a site that uses JBoss as a web server and then updated the content using git (a repository management tool) with some code (under development for a new web widget we are working on) and published the application. Nice and fast! If you use the "-s" option via the command line mode, it will also engage a HAProxy component and auto-scale up and down.

Both OpenShift and Cloud Foundry are great examples of what can be accomplished with an on-premise private cloud. OpenShift just last Monday open-sourced their code.
Cloud Foundry is already open source. - Good Times

Open Grid Forum - Oxford, UK

R2AD represented DISA at the OGF-34 event which was held in Oxford, UK. Overall, the conference proved a good exchange of information between the various working groups as well as between standards organizations that were in attendance (i.e.: DMTF and EGI). R2AD presented the PaaS slides to the OCCI working group.

The OCCI WG will be taking up PaaS standardization after the work on the JSON rendering is complete. The Cloud Interoperability BoF was very interesting and they will form a working group to establish profiles for interoperability. CompatibleOne also presented it's open source cloud broker to the OCCI working group. CompatibleOne uses OCCI in a fascinating way...check it out!

Cloud West 2011

R2AD presented our Android Client at Cloud Expo 2011 in Santa Clara. The event was exciting and full of buzz about the next levels of Cloud Computing to include Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Mobile Cloud Clients. R2AD's VP of West Coast, David Moolenaar and R2AD's CTO Michael Behrens and our Cloud Architect Eugene Luster were on site for Cloud Expo 2011. Our Mobile Cloud Client slides for the event are now available from our site and soon shall be available from the Cloud Expo 2011 main site.

[Android Cloud Client Demo] David was able to present a live demo of the Android Cloud client which uses the OCCI and CDMI interfaces to manage Cloud resources.

R2AD would like to thank the Cloud Expo Organizers for a wonderful event and also the OGF, SNIA, and DMTF for their standards development efforts.

See you at the next Cloud Expo!

Android Application Posted

R2AD's first android app has been published on Google's Marketplace: https://market.android.com.

R2AD is making certain applications such as the security banner available to the Android Forge.Mil Project. If you want to learn about our Security Banner Widget for the Android, visit the link or use your smart phone to find the app!
- Android Market (Web)

We are working to help our customers with architecture, design, and custom development of fully integrated and tested mobile applications. We are leveraging our programming experience and see the smart phones as ideal cloud clients. R2AD is participating in the SNIA/OGF Cloud Fest is building an OCCI and CDMI Android app.

IEEE CloudCom 2010

The IEEE CloudCom 2010 was a fantastic event from multiple perspectives. First, it was a first class conference with a great mix of national and international attendance which offered relevant information on current cloud computing topics. The conference included a number of very helpful tutorials such as those offered on Hadoop, Open Nebula, Microsoft Azure, Twister, and others.
R2AD was proud to have been accepted to present a poster on our recent cloud client which was sponsored by DISA and was developed using the OCCI and CDMI cloud specifications.
Our poster paper and poster PDF are also available from our web site.

The Future Grid work by Geoffrey Fox and his team is going to be interesting to follow and exciting to work with. Map Reduce was a popular topic of a number of the papers presented. Hadoop is one of many applications which can be used in cloud environments.

Ian Foster gave a great key note, in which he emphasized the need for additional infrastructure automation so that cloud users can focus on their main concerns. With this in mind, he introduced Globus Online with a data transfer service as an offering.
Microsoft's Krishna Kumar provided a great Azure tutorial which was echoed in Dennis Gannon's keynote address which emphasized their Truck based cloud data center and their practical tool integration to the cloud (i.e. Excel ribbon and Blast tool).
Standards were also discussed by a panel which included representatives from the Open Grid Forum (OGF), Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), and others.

It will be interesting to explore many of the topics discussed during the conference...such as using a cloud for geospatial processing of data which is updated often. R2AD will explore this and other areas in support of our customers and mobile computing development efforts.

Visit the IEEE CloudCom 2010 site for complete coverage, including a full gallery of images and video.

R2AD presents at Storage Developers Conference 2010

West Coast VP David Moolenaar and CTO Michael Behrens presented at the SDC-2010 event in September 2010. The presentation focused on the recent experience in developing the R2AD Cloud Client. Approximately 300 developers in the storage community attended the conference. One of the main tracks was on cloud computing and how the new CDMI specification from SNIA can be used by developers. Visit the R2AD cloud page for more details.

Virtual Computing Considerations

When developing VMs a while back, these were documented as Michael's Laws of Virtual Computing - however they are really just some observations which help demystify the subject, enjoy...

1. Whether you have 1000 virtual computers or 1000 physical computers, you still have 1000 computers.
   
2. Software bugs exhibited in physical machines are also exhibited in virtual machines.
   
3. Applications which run slowly on physical computers are still slow in virtual computers.
   
4. Hardware failures affect virtual computers too.
   
5. Applications that consume bandwidth, memory, CPU, and disk space will continue to use resources when virtualized.
   
6. Software license fees still apply when running applications in virtual environments.
   

A new West Coast office in San Diego, CA is now open for business. R2AD is proud to introduce our new VP of West Cost Operations, David Moolenaar! David is currently focusing on our cloud computing client which shall be demonstrated at the next Open Grid Forum in Chicago.


R2AD is developing a JavaFX based cloud client for the OGF/SNAI demo which shall be presented at OGF 29 and possibly at SDC 2010. The client implements the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) and the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI).