Grid Meter » Open Source Virtualization and the Grid

October 18, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Open Source Virtualization and the Grid

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Not surprisingly, some of the most interesting progress around virtualization is happening in open source. There has been quite a bit of excitement around Xen making its way into popular Linux distros, which means that ISV certification and support will be right around the corner for enterprises that use Linux virtualization. So a free OS with free virtualization capabilities (and readily available support), running on a preferred architecture of cheap servers (rather than big, expensive SMPs or mainframes) ... organizations are chomping at the bit to realize the cost savings that virtualization promises.

Today, on the open source Grid computing side, researchers are busily working out the details around how the Grid can leverage virtualization – and how the Grid will carve out "Virtual Workspaces." Katarzyna Keahey, Assistant Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory explains:

"A Virtual Workspace is an abstraction of an execution environment that can be made dynamically available in the Grid, and it's primarily focused on two broad requirements. One of them is the ability to associate an activity in the Grid with a certain quantum of resource, a certain percentage of CPU... say, memory, or disk, and so forth. The other requirement is recreating the necessary environment (in terms of software configuration) that the user needs on the Grid. Most applications require a very specific configuration - how do you provide it on a remote resource in the Grid reliably and dynamically? Those are the main issues that Virtual Workspaces are trying to tackle.

About two years ago, when we first started talking to users about our prototypes using virtual machines for the Grid all the focus was on VMWare. And because the licensing fees are high, the project was slow to take off. We'd hear people ask 'If I have to spend $5K on a virtual machine, why wouldn't I just buy a real one?'

Last summer we start experimenting with Xen, which is a very efficient open source hypervisor implementation slated to become a part of the Linux kernel in the near future. Suddenly we started getting traction as a lot of people became more interested in exploring virtual machines in Grid environments. So these two aspects - efficiency and availability -- provided a crucial critical mass for the project."

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on October 18, 2005 07:07 AM

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