Virtual Organization Clusters: Self-provisioned clouds on the grid

Abstract

a b s t r a c tVirtual Organization Clusters (VOCs) are a novel mechanism for overlaying dedicated private cluster systems on existing grid infrastructures. VOCs provide customized, homogeneous execution environments on a per-Virtual Organization basis, without the cost of physical cluster construction or the overhead of per-job containers. Administrative access and overlay network capabilities are granted to Virtual Organizations (VOs) that choose to implement VOC technology, while the system remains completely transparent to end users and non-participating VOs. Unlike existing systems that require explicit leases, VOCs are autonomically self-provisioned and self-managed according to configurable usage policies.The work presented here contains two parts: a technology-agnostic formal model that describes the properties of VOCs and a prototype implementation of a physical cluster with hosted VOCs, based on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. Test results demonstrate the feasibility of VOCs for use with high-throughput grid computing jobs. With the addition of a ''watchdog'' daemon for monitoring scheduler queues and adjusting VOC size, the results also demonstrate that cloud computing environments can be autonomically self-provisioned in response to changing workload conditions.

Running User-Provided Virtual Machines in Batch-Oriented Computing Clusters

“…Figure 3 presents the NPB-MZ test results from 1 to 16 processors using two different views, representing the percentage of native performance VMs achieved (efficiency) and the total throughput. VMs achieved above 97% of the native hardware performance in all serial tests, close to the results in [4,5] for system level virtualization. It also shows a significant penalty for using the user-mode VDE Ethernet network instead of system-mode TAP.…”

Architectural Requirements for Cloud Computing Systems: An Enterprise Cloud Approach

“…[23], lease-oriented mechanism for Grid system virtualization by Shirako [39], Autonomic Clouds on the Grid by Murphy et al [54]. Other related work focuses on Dynamic Virtual Clustering [20], Violin [25], Virtual Workspaces [45], Virtual Cluster [28], In-VIGO [1], Grid and Cloud integration for next generation network [60] and Virtual Organization Clusters [53]. In particular, Cloud Computing is considered the business-oriented evolution of Grid Computing, which was focused on research and collaboration [29].…”

Using clouds to scale grid resources: An economic model

“…Later work [21] has further clarified the distinction between them, and analyzed how grids could evolve to benefit from the ideas introduced by the cloud (or the other way around, see for example [22]). In [23,24] the authors present an architecture for the dynamic provisión of resources to the virtual organizations (VO) of a grid.…”