Virtual Cluster Workspaces for Grid Applications

Virtual machines provide a promising platform for computational Grids. By their very nature -virtualization of underlying hardware -they enable instantiation of a new, independently configured guest environment on a host resource. In addition, they offer the benefits of isolation and fine-grain enforcement and, given the ability to serialize their state and migrate, offer increased flexibility to environments in the Grid. To take advantage of this new technology in Grid computing, we introduced the concept of virtual workspaces which can be configured, managed and deployed in a Grid environment. Since clusters underlie most significant Grid deployments today, in this paper we extended the notion of virtual workspaces to include virtual clusters. We describe changes to Grid architecture and evaluate virtual cluster creation and management, the impact of executing in virtual clusters on applications as well as the possibility of running several virtual clusters on one physical cluster.