Virtualization and Grid Computing

I just ran across these GCE07 papers online, looks like some good things to read about (gateway authorization and GridTorrent papers look especially interesting). GCE == “Grid Computing Environments” (this workshop is colocated with SC in Reno next week).

Borja Sotomayor, my esteemed colleague, has an interesting article No CPU Left Behind about VMs and education. Check it out.

The date of the VTDC 2007 workshop has been confirmed. It will be on Monday, November 12th. See you there!

Last year’s International Workshop on Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing (VTDC) was an interesting and productive day and an exciting complement to Supercomputing.

This year’s call for papers has been announced!

===============================================================
CALL FOR PAPERS (VTDC 2007)

Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing

held in conjunction with SC 07, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking and Storage.
===============================================================

date: November, 2007, Reno, NV, USA

SC 07: http://sc07.supercomputing.org/
VTDC 07: http://workspace.globus.org/vtdc07/
Last year’s workshop: http://workspace.globus.org/vtdc06/

General Information

The convergence of virtualization technologies and distributed computing is an exciting development and the subject of much research in both academia and industry. The VTDC workshop is intended to be a forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences on the use of virtualization technologies in distributed computing, the challenges and opportunities offered by the development of virtual systems themselves, as well as case studies of application of virtualization. The scope of “virtualization technologies” includes techniques and concepts to enable virtual machines, virtual networks, virtual data, virtual storage, virtual applications and virtual instruments. The scope of “distributed computing” includes Grid-computing, cluster computing, peer-to-peer computing and mobile computing.

VTDC 2007 topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Using virtualization technologies for resource management and QoS assurance
• Security aspects of using virtualization in a distributed environment
• Virtual networks
• Virtual data and storage systems
• Fault tolerance in virtualization
• Virtualization in P2P
• Monitoring techniques in virtualization
• Virtualization-based adaptive/autonomic systems
• Virtual datacenters
• Virtual environment factories and services
• Environment configuration
• Virtual machine management
• Modeling (applications and systems)
• Case studies of applications using virtual technologies
• Deployment studies of virtualization technologies
• Tools relevant to virtualization
• Virtualization as vehicle for outsourcing

Paper Submission

Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished work that exposes a new problem, advocates a specific solution, or reports on actual experience.

Papers should be submitted as full-length 8 page papers of double column text using single spaces 10pt size type on an 8.5″x11″ paper, as per IEEE manuscript guidelines. Paper submission instructions will be placed on the workshop web page at http://workspace.globus.org/vtdc07/.

Presentations will be invited based on the originality, technical merit, and topical relevance of their submissions. Please contact vtdc07@mcs.anl.gov with questions.

Important dates:

September 24, 2007 - Paper submission
October 16, 2007 - Notification of acceptance
October 26, 2007 - Final version due

Here is a good set of pointers about Google’s recent Seattle Conference on Scalability:

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-on-google-scalability-conference.html

It’s been busy lately, attended the first dev.Globus All Hands Meeting and TeraGrid ‘07 right here in Madison.

At TG07, Kate gave a talk which is online. The paper she presented discusses among other things contextualization, the structure and mechanisms by which an appliance/workspace is “told” what it needs in order to adapt to its deployed environment. This is not just adaptation to site specific services but also to other appliances that may be deployed with it such as in a virtual cluster deployment.

Amidst the bustle we implemented a new backend to the Workspace Service, to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). We’ve deployed it to the University of Chicago’s Teraport cluster and will currently pay for usage by selected collaborators.

Besides being somewhat fun to implement (including getting the Globus and Amazon Secure Message stacks on the same wavelength), I think it’s going to be interesting.

Because grid resources are cautiously approaching the pioneering switch to virtualizing resources [1], even in part, it is going to be interesting and educational to see what people will be able to accomplish with workspaces when a large pool of resources is actually available on tap — today.

Because the same deployment protocols can be used for both native and EC2 resources, there are of course capacity overflow use cases. In the right situations, VMs are a good mechanism for providers to dynamically reach more consumers as the need arises.

For a feature list and description, see What is the EC2 backend?

——-

[1] and some would say inevitable switch, even with the performance costs. Consider also that ‘virtualizing resources’ may mean physical node re-imaging, cf. Virtual Workspaces: Achieving Quality of Service and Quality of Life in the Grid.

From Call for papers: Special issue on Networks for Grid Applications

Grid developers and practitioners are increasingly realising the importance of an efficient network support. Entire classes of applications would greatly benefit by a network-aware Grid middleware, able to effectively manage the network resource in terms of scheduling, access and use. Conversely, the peculiar requirements of Grid applications provide stimulating drivers for new challenging research towards the development of Grid-aware networks.

Cooperation between Grid middleware and network infrastructure driven by a common control plane is a key factor to effectively empower the global Grid platform for the execution of network-intensive applications, requiring massive data transfers, very fast and low-latency connections, and stable and guaranteed transmission rates. Big e-science projects, as well as industrial and engineering applications for data analysis, image processing, multimedia, or visualisation just to name a few are awaiting an efficient Grid network support. They would be boosted by a global Grid platform enabling end-to-end dynamic bandwidth allocation, broadband and low-latency access, interdomain access control, and other network performance monitoring capabilities.

As a natural extension of the discussion forum provided by the Gridnets conference series, this special section aims at gathering top-quality contributions to the most debated topics currently tackled in Grid networking research. Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Network architectures and technologies for grids
* The network as a first class Grid resource: network resource information publication, brokering and co-scheduling with other Grid resources
* Interaction of the network with distributed data management systems
* Network monitoring, traffic characterisation and performance analysis
* Inter-layer interactions: optical layer with higher layer protocols, integration among layers
* Experience with pre-production Grid network infrastructures and exchange points
* Peer-to-peer network enhancements applied to the Grid
* Network support for wireless and ad hoc grids
* Data replication and multicasting strategies and novel data transport protocols
* Fault-tolerance, self healing networks
* Security and scalability issues when connecting a large number of sites within a virtual organization VPN
* Simulations
* New concepts and requirements which may fundamentally reshape the evolution of Networks.
* Integration of advanced optical networking technologies into the Grid environment
* End to end lightpath provisioning software systems and emergent standards

Our paper about virtual appliance configuration and management was accepted to the TeraGrid 2007 conference and is now online: A Scalable Approach To Deploying And Managing Appliances.

This paper examines configuration and security issues that large and heterogeneous deployments of virtual appliances/workspaces will face.

From the introduction:

The goal of this paper is to develop a holistic approach that would provide scalable and sustainable ways of managing and deploying virtual workspaces implemented as VM images. We will discuss ways of leveraging existing configuration management tools, exemplified by the Bcfg2 system, for VM image lifecycle management that will allow systems staff to deploy robust virtualized resources for their users. We will also describe the process of contextualization — integration of an appliance in its deployment context — and discuss its reference implementation using Bcfg2 and the Workspace Service.