Virtual Clusters for Grid Communities

A challenging issue facing Grid communities is that while Grids can provide access to many heterogeneous resources, the resources to which access is provided often do not match the needs of a specific application or service. In an environment in which both resource availability and software requirements evolve rapidly, this disconnect can lead to resource underutilization, user frustration, and much wasted effort spent on bridging the gap between applications and resources. We show here how these issues can be overcome by allowing authorized Grid clients to negotiate the creation of virtual clusters made up of virtual machines configured to suit client requirements for software environment and hardware allocation. We introduce descriptions and methods that allow us to deploy flexibly configured virtual cluster workspaces. We describe their configuration, implementation, and evaluate them in the context of a virtual cluster representing the environment in production use by the Open Sci...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: Ian T. Foster, Timothy Freeman, Katarzyna Keahey, Doug Scheftner, Borja Sotomayor, Xuehai Zhang
• Keywords: CCGRID 2006, Cluster Computing, Grid, Grid Communities, Virtual Clusters