ANU Computer Science Technical Reports
TR-CS-07-01
Samuel Chang and Peter Strazdins.
A survey of how virtual machine and intelligent runtime environments can
support cluster computing.
February 2007.
[POSTSCRIPT (503560 bytes)] [PDF (474436 bytes)]
Abstract: The use of cluster computers in high
performance computing environments has recently been on the rise and at
present, it presents a fertile source of unsolved research problems. With the
Australian National University's (ANU) High Performance Computing (HPC)
research group planning to undertake two projects in the field of cluster
computing very shortly, the aim of this survey is to lay the groundwork for
both projects by providing comprehensive, up to date information on current
research related to virtual machines and intelligent runtime environments for
use in the context of a large cluster or grid system. This survey covers a
broad range of information sources, namely the proceedings of top
conferences, journals, and technical reports published by notable research
groups and researchers. We summarize key papers and make listings of research
groups which are undertaking projects that we feel are worth taking note of.
Subsequently, the information gathered is synthesized to identify unsolved
problems and potential areas of future work. Notable findings presented in
this survey are that paravirtualization of operating systems is no longer a
necessary requirement for use with the Xen hypervisor as processor vendors
Intel and AMD are building virtualization support into their processors,
migration of entire operating systems now incurs as little as 100ms down time
by iteratively pre copying pages. We have also come to the conclusion that an
important first step in the successful development of an intelligent runtime
environment is to develop a system which can accurately profile the hardware
that a cluster system is made up of as well as applications that would be run
on it.
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Last modified: Tue May 31 12:56:01 EST 2011