Abstract
Distributed and parallel systems are typically managed with “static” settings: the operating system (OS) and the runtime environment (RTE) are specified at a given time and cannot be changed to fit an application’s needs. This means that every time application developers want to use their application on a new execution platform, the application has to be ported to this new environment, which may be expensive in terms of application modifications and developer time. However, the science resides in the applications and not in the OS or the RTE. Therefore, it should be beneficial to adapt the OS and the RTE to the application instead of adapting the applications to the OS and the RTE.
This document presents the concept of Virtual System Environments (VSE), which enables application developers to specify and create a virtual environment that properly fits their application’s needs. For that four challenges have to be addressed: (i) definition of the VSE itself by the application developers, (ii) deployment of the VSE, (iii) system administration for the platform, and (iv) protection of the platform from the running VSE. We therefore present an integrated tool for the definition and deployment of VSEs on top of traditional and virtual (i.e., using system-level virtualization) execution platforms. This tool provides the capability to choose the degree of delegation for system administration tasks and the degree of protection from the application (e.g., using virtual machines).
To summarize, the VSE concept enables the customization of the OS/RTE used for the execution of application by users without compromising local system administration rules and execution platform protection constraints.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Brockmeier, J.: The Definitive Guide to User Mode Linux. APress (2004)
Dague, S.: System Installation Suite Massive Installation for Linux. In: The 4th Annual Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS 2002), Ottawa, Canada, June 26-29 (2002)
de Goede, H.: Root over nfs clients & server howto, http://www.clusterresources.com/pages/products/moab-cluster-suite/workload-manager.php
Furlani, J.L., Osel, P.W.: Abstract Yourself With Modules. In: Proceedings of the 10th Large Installation Systems Administration Conference (LISA 1996), Chicago, IL, September 29–October 4, pp. 193–204 (1996)
Geist, G.A., Kohl, J.A., Scott, S.L., Papadopoulos, P.M.: HARNESS: Adaptable virtual machine environment for heterogeneous clusters. Parallel Processing Letters 9(2), 253–273 (1999)
Georgiou, Y., Leduc, J., Videau, B., Peyrard, J., Richard, O.: A tool for environment deployment in clusters and light grids. In: Second Workshop on System Management Tools for Large-Scale Parallel Systems (SMTPS 2006), Rhodes Island, Greece (April 2006)
jorg, H., Oxer, H., Hoxer, H., Buchacker, K., Sieh, V.: Implementing a user mode linux with minimal changes from original kernel (2002)
Krsul, I., Ganguly, A., Zhang, J., Fortes, J.A.B., Figueiredo, R.J.: Vmplants: Providing and managing virtual machine execution environments for grid computing. In: SC 2004: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, Washington, DC, USA. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2004)
Moab workload manager, http://www.clusterresources.com/pages/products/moab-cluster-suite/workload-manager.php
Mugler, J., Naughton, T., Scott, S.L., Barrett, B., Lumsdaine, A., Squyres, J.M., des Ligneris, B., Giraldeau, F., Leangsuksun, C.: OSCAR Clusters. In: Proceedings of the 5th Annual Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS 2003), Ottawa, Canada, July 23-26 (2003)
Papadopoulos, P.M., Katz, M.J., Bruno, G.: Npaci rocks: tools and techniques for easily deploying manageable linux clusters. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 15(7-8), 707–725 (2003)
PVFS: Parallel virtual file system, http://www.parl.clemson.edu/pvfs
Sapuntzakis, C., Lam, M.S.: Virtual Appliances in the Collective: A Road to Hassle-free Computing. In: Proceedings of HotOS 2003: 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems. USENIX (2003)
Sterling, T., Savarese, D., Becker, D.J., Dorband, J.E., Ranawake, U.A., Packer, C.V.: BEOWULF: A parallel workstation for scientific computation. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Parallel Processing, Oconomowoc, WI, pp. I:11–14 (1995)
Vallée, G., Naughton, T., Scott, S.L.: System management software for virtual environments. In: Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computing Frontiers 2007, Ischia, Italy, May 7-9 (2007)
VMware, Inc, http://www.vmware.com
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Vallée, G. et al. (2008). Virtual System Environments. In: Boursas, L., Carlson, M., Hommel, W., Sibilla, M., Wold, K. (eds) Systems and Virtualization Management. Standards and New Technologies. SVM 2008. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 18. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88708-9_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88708-9_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-88707-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-88708-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)