Real-Time Applications

VM Turntable: Making Large-Scale Remote Execution more Efficient and Secure with Virtual Machines Riding on Dynamic Lightpaths

URL:
www.science.uva.nl/research/air

Contact:
Franco Travostino, Nortel, USA, travos @ nortel.com

Collaborators:
Nortel, USA: Franco Travostino, Chetan Jog, Satish Raghunath, Inder Monga, Paul Daspit
Nortel, Canada: Phil Wang
Advanced Internet Research Group, University of Amsterdam, NL: Cees de Laat, Leon Gommans, Bas van Oudenaarde
International Center for Advanced Internet Research, Northwestern University, USA: Joe Mambretti, Fei Yeh

Traditional grid computing focuses on remote computing and data analysis, while the underlying network resources are treated as separate and inflexible. Recent advances in controllable and dynamic lightpaths extend the meaning of “remote execution” to include the networks themselves, creating an environment that permits orchestration of computation+data+network resources. With this capability three problems associated with remote execution are addressed: (a) the elusive locality of data references (with computation and working datasets that often end up being separated by a whole ocean), (b) confidentiality and integrity (with sensitive programs and/or data at the mercy of subtly compromised, bugged hosting environments), and (c) portability, versioning woes in the presence of end systems’ complex software stacks. The VM Turntable is structured around Xen-based Linux Virtual Machines that can be migrated in real time while still supporting live applications - transporting the whole set of memory pages and hard disk contents to various destinations. The live migration of Virtual Machines exploits a high degree of pipelining between the staggered operations of assembling the data to be transferred, verifying its integrity, and finally halting and transferring execution. To maintain lightpath security, the VM Turntable utilizes a token-based approach to efficiently enforce policies at both the bearer and control path levels (see the iGrid application “Token-based Network Element Access Control and Path Selection”). At iGrid 2005, the VM Turntable live-migrates the execution of a search-refine iterative workflow against unique datasets located in Amsterdam, Chicago and San Diego.