FAQ

Fura is for developers or highly technical enthusiasts who want the open and latest grid technology early and often to use it in non-critical computing environments.

It is not recommended to use Fura in production environments where support options, maintenance, and software/hardware certifications are valued. For production environments, you must use either Fura Open Enterprise Edition (GPL Licensed) or Fura Commercial Enterprise Edition (Commercial EULA).

Who is GridSystems?

GridSystems is a private company who sponsors the Fura project by contributing engineering, management, and infrastructure resources. GridSystems also maintains and distributes two enterprise versions of Fura (FOEE) and (FCEE) designed for production environments where support and maintenance services are necessary.

What are the differences between the Fura project hosted at SF and the enterprise editions of Fura?

The Fura project is addressed to developers and, therefore, its focus is on bleeding-edge technology, not on stability. The enterprise editions of Fura (FOEE and FCEE) are addressed for production environments, where the focus is on stability, reliability, and support. Moreover, the enterprise editions are easy to deploy and manage.

What are the differences between the two enterprise versions of Fura?

Fura Open Enterprise Edition (FOEE) is GPL licensed, and as such, the source code and the freedom to modify it are provided. Notice that because of the nature of GPL, any plug-in or connector developed to work with Fura or FOEE must be also distributed under the GPL license.

On the other hand, Fura Commercial Enterprise Edition (FCEE) is released under a commercial EULA. This version is for companies that prefer not to use open source products. Also plug-ins and connectors developed with this version can be distributed without the GPL.

Aside from the EULA and the derived consequences, both versions are identical.

Is GridSystems violating GPL by distributing a commercial version?

No. GridSystems as the proprietary of the code can distribute it using a dual license mechanism. FCEE is not under the GPL license because it does not derive from any of the GPL versions, but directly from the code owned by GridSystems. Fura contains third party components, but their respective licenses allow as well this distribution scheme.

Is it possible to buy support/maintenance for the Fura version in SourceForge from GridSystems?

No. GridSystems and their partners provide support and maintenance only for the enterprise editions of Fura (FOEE and FCEE). If you like the open source philosophy and are interested in support/maintenance, you should use FOEE.

What is Fura?

Fura is a self-contained grid middleware that allows the grid enablement and distribution of applications on heterogeneous computational resources. Fura features a web-based GUI, wizard-guided installation and configuration, and Web Services compliance.

Is Fura an extra-corporate Grid?

Extra-grids, or extra-corporate Grids are Grids distributed over more than one administrative domain. There are two variations in extra-grids: centralized virtual organizations and market grids. Centralized virtual organizations are typical in academic environments, especially in high-energy physics. Market grids depend on B2B technology, and allow customers to access Grid Services from a Service Provider.

Fura does not allow the construction of centralized virtual organizations. If you want to do that, you can try with [Globus]. On the other hand, Fura supports market grids. To do that you need a B2B layer. Fura has been integrated with [GRIA] for that purpose. Fura+GRIA constitute an extra-corporate Grid of the market grid kind.

Is Fura an Internet Grid?

Internet Grid such as SETI@home pool resources from desktop PCs connected to the Internet for scientific or social projects. Usually the software runs on the screensaver. Fura is not an Internet Grid, although supports the distribution of nodes through the Internet or through an intranet. If you are interested in Internet Grids, see for instance [BOINC].

Is Fura a batch scheduler?

A batch scheduler lets you schedule batch jobs. Each batch job is independent; there is no concept of application virtualization. There is no automatic parallelization of repetitive jobs (parametric sweeps or sensitivity analysis). There is no resource management, or advances security and user policies.

Fura can use batch schedulers as a particular kind of resource, but it also manages other types of resources, like lightweight Agents, and it has a pluggable architecture so it can be extended to manage any kind of resource. On top of that there are many functionalities to design Grid applications, parallelize automatically repetitive jobs, encapsulate applications, manage users, roles, permissions, etc. It provides an API in many languages, a WSDL interface, many graphical tools for development and management and a large etc.

In summary, Fura is not a batch scheduler, but it can use batch schedulers as resources if you need so. Examples of batch schedulers are [SGE], [LSF], or [PBS].

Is Fura a corporate Grid?

A corporate Grid is a middleware that:

mediates between jobs to be run and resources available
can combine all the resources in your intranet
including PCs and servers
including all operating systems: windows, unix, linux, and MacOSX
is easy to install, administer and maintain
is targeted to easy deploy already existing business or research applications and processes

Examples of corporate Grids are Fura, [DataSynapse's GridServer], or [United Devices' GridMP].

So Fura is a corporate Grid. Additionally, Fura goes beyond what other corporate Grid achieve:

provides lightning fast grid-enablement of business and research applications with GridStudio (1-3 hours)
handles automatic parametric sweeps
provides an extremely easy installation and set up process (1-2 hours)
can be used in an extra-corporate Grid
is open source and extensible through its plug-in architecture

Do Web Services affect performance?

Fura is based on a Service-Oriented Architecture implemented through Web Services. There is a real overhead associated with the use of Web Services. Typically the XML and SOAP stacks introduce a delay of 15-40 ms in the calls. When strong security is demanded, this amount can increase (even be doubled). As a rule of the thumb, one should not rely on Web Services when times become critical within a few hundreds of milliseconds (considering you probably need several calls to perform a certain transaction).

Now, suppose your applications are not affected by the hundreds-of-milliseconds limit. Should you worry about future performance issues when your applications evolve, getting bigger and heavier? The answer is no. These delays are basically due to the processing stack of XML and SOAP, which essentially relies on the processing power of the CPU. This stack behaves as a layer which is not affected by the complexity of the underlying applications, so the delay will remain almost constant.

One could think that network bandwidth can also be a limitation, given the additional text in form of brackets and tags that is associated with XML, but this is a small factor compared to the XML-SOAP processing time. Our tests have demonstrated that even though SOAP is implemented to run on HTTP, which is inherently slower than FTP or MPI, the difference in the transfer speed when compared to FTP is hardly noticeable as the file size increases.

In conclusion, Web Services-based distributed computing is slightly slower, in terms of communication overhead, but the difference diminishes as the size of the transferred file increases. For most corporate uses, the benefits of using Grids and of Web Services and SOA in general clearly outnumber the small performance differences.

Does Fura use third party open source?

Fura uses third party components which are available under different open source licenses, including BSD or the Apache Software License . The components provided by GridSystems are available under the GPL license.

Why are the binaries for Fura not available?

Because the Fura project in SourceForge is addressed to developers and highly technical enthusiasts who normally prefer to get their own binaries by compiling the source code. Notice also that because of the 'release early and often' policy and the multiplatform character of the application, providing the binaries of each version becomes quite disk consuming.

Why are the version numbers of Fura and the enterprise editions of Fura different?

Because as their focus are different, so are their life cycles. Remember that the focus of Fura is on bleeding-edge technology, but the focus of the enterprise editions is on stability, reliability, and support.

I am interested in being part of the Fura community. What should I do?

The main communication channel for Fura community is the [forum]. There you can find the latest news related to the Fura community, and you can participate in it.

If you are thinking about being a tester, contribute with patches, or simply share your ideas about what we should add to Fura, then you should go to the [tracker] pages. Notice that you will have to create a SourceForge account if you don't have one yet.

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