Virtualization and Grid Computing

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!

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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.
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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

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.

The interesting presentations from the 4th Xen Summit are now available:

http://www.xensource.com/xen/xensummit.html

I did not get to go this time unfortunately!

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.

My colleague Borja Sotomayor’s Masters paper, A Resource Management Model for VM-Based Virtual Workspaces, is now available for download. Congratulations Borja!

This is a long but well organized paper that goes into detail about different resource management scenarios for VMs and grid computing. It includes discussion and experimental results of combining different scheduling techniques for VMs (including advanced reservation) and accurately dealing with overheads (this problem is introduced in Overhead Matters: A Model for Virtual Resource Management).

Abstract follows in quotes. I also recommend the two page introduction to get a better idea of what this is all about.

Virtual workspaces provide an abstraction for dynamically deployable execution environments on a Grid. For this abstraction to be effective, it must be possible to provide on-demand software environments and enforceable fine grained resource allocations for these workspaces. Virtual machines are a promising vehicle to realize the virtual workspace abstraction, as they allow us to instantiate a precisely defined virtual resource, configured with desired software configuration and hardware properties, on a set of physical resources.

In this paper, we describe a model of virtual machine provisioning in a Grid environment that allows us to define such virtual resources and instantiate them on a physical Grid infrastructure. Our model focuses, firstly, on providing users with an accurate representation of virtual resources. To accomplish this, the overhead resulting from instantiating and managing virtual resources is scheduled at the same level as virtual resources, instead of being deducted from a user’s resource allocation. Secondly, our model also focuses on efficiently managing virtual resources by reducing the amount of overhead.

We argue that this model, compared to resource management models that rely on the job abstraction for remote execution, enables resource providers to accurately provision resources to users, while using their physical resources efficiently. We show experimental results that demonstrate the benefits of this model both from the resource providers and the user’s perspective, in two common resource management scenarios for virtual workspaces: advance reservations and batch-style submissions.

For more relevant talks and papers from the group, see the Workspace publications page.

In this month’s Globus Consortium Journal is an article by Kate Keahey giving an update on VTDC 06 (she was the PC). She discusses adoption issues, especially current missing links. Highly recommended if you are interested in the intersection between Grid computing and virtualization!

From the VEE 07 call for papers:

The 2007 ACM International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments Call For Papers

VEE brings together researchers and practitioners in the area of virtual execution environments for programs. These areas include such topics as high-level language virtual machines (JVMs, CLRs, etc.), process and system virtual machines, hardware support for virtualization, interpreters, translators, machine emulators, and simulators. The VEE conference seeks original papers in areas including, but not limited to:

* Virtual machines for high-level languages
* High-level languages for virtualization
* System support for virtual execution environments
* Virtual execution environment support for parallelism
* Virtualization for security, correctness, and reliability
* Dynamic compilation techniques
* Binary translation and optimization
* Novel aspects or applications of interpreters
* Processor/architecture simulators
* Experiences with virtual execution environments

Paper submission deadline is Monday, February 5th, 2007.

VEE 07 website