Virtualization and Grid Computing

Groups:

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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?

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[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.

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.

Here is an interesting video of a talk given by Ari Zilka (CTO and founder of Terracotta Technologies) to employees of Google. Terracotta was recently open sourced and is receiving good reviews and attention. I am excited to experiment with it.

• Direct link to Cluster your JVM to Simplify Application Architecture.
• Online introduction by Ari Zilka, the speaker.