Virtual is the New Real: Virtualization in the Grids

Abstract

The ability to enforce quality-of-service, provide a secure, isolated remote execution environment, and further customize and manage such environments are amongst the most important challenges facing Grid computing today. Virtual machines (VMs), integrated into existing Grid security and resource management infrastructure, can provide an interesting solution to these requirements. The concept of virtualization allows a client to create an environment configured with a required platform and software stack on almost any resource. It further allows the client to suspend and resume VM operations allowing the migration of VM state across different resources. This technology also provides excellent isolation and fine-grained security forensics as well as potential for policy-driven fine-grained enforcement of resource usage. Thanks to recent advances in virtual machine technologies, these advantages no longer come at a significant performance cost: many of today’s virtual machine implementations offer excellent performance and resource usage efficiency. In this presentation, I will explore the potential of using virtual machines in Grid computing. I will describe features of different implementations, their performance and their respective suitability for use in the Grid environment. Since each new technology brings with it challenges to the existing paradigm, we will discuss a sketch of a Grid architecture integrating virtual machines, identify those challenges and discuss solutions in the area of security and resource management. We will describe a prototype implementation of such architecture using the Globus Toolkit 3 (GT3) and present some initial experiences with applications.

Short Bio

Kate Keahey’s research focuses on virtualization, Grid computing and other aspects of distributed and parallel computing. Her early work in this area centered on developing techniques for efficiently combining parallel and distributed computing. Working in this area, she developed systems adapting object-oriented and component architectures, specifically CORBA, to the needs of high performance computing. She was a founding member of  the Common Component Architecture (CCA) forum dedicated to advancing those ideas. More recently, her interests and publications have increasingly focused on virtualization, policy-driven resource management, and various aspects of obtaining quality of service in the Grid environment. To further progress in this area, she chaired the Grid Economic Services Architecture (GESA) working group at the Global Grid Forum (GGF) and became an active member of the GGF Grid Resource Allocation Protocol (GRAAP) working group, co-authoring the WS-Agreement standard draft currently under public comment. Find out more about her research at http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~keahey/pubs.html

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