Providing grid services based on virtualization and cloud technologies

Abstract

CESGA is operating a totally virtualized grid infrastructure that supports several production sites for different grid projects (EGEE, EELA, int.eu.grid (I2G), Ibergrid, and other regional grid projects) as well as several development sites created on demand to test new middleware releases both for EGEE certification and pre-production activities. The final architecture that results from several years of development is described showing how to apply modern virtualization solutions like Xen hypervisor to migrate from an entire physical cluster to virtual machines. Thanks to a collaboration with FORMIGA's project the infrastructure also includes resources from computer labs. Worker Node VMs are automatically started following a pre-defined schedule that guarantees that the computers are not in use. Extensive benchmarks, including two of the most used applications at our supercomputing center, have been performed to quantify the performance loss of the virtual infrastructure. Currently cloud computing technologies are being explored as a way to improve the service deployment process in our platform. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.