An important focus of distributed computing research is to decouple the roles of resource consumer and resource provider, and recruit computing and storage resources from providers dynamically to meet demands of consumers. This decoupling promises on-demand resource access for the consumers, and promotes diversity of supply and economies of scale among providers-thus increasing flexibility and reducing cost. This old but powerful idea underlies research on grids, virtualization, utilities, and overlay networks. However, its practical realization has been hindered by high participation costs for providers and consumers. Consumers struggle to acquire, configure, and manage remote resources and to adapt applications, while providers must adapt local system configurations to enable remote access. Two distinct threads of computer systems research seem poised to overcome this stalemate. Service oriented architectures provide flexible and scalable management interfaces and infrastructure, while virtual machine technology can turn any computer into a secure user-configurable resource. The combination of these threads enables a fundamental new model for distributed computing based on remote management and dynamic reconfiguration of virtualized resources. The challenge (and opportunity) to be addressed in this project: to bring together service-oriented grid and virtual machine technologies to enable robust, scalable, and secure on-demand access to distributed resources-and to construct the abstractions, interface, policies, and algorithms that applications need to function in a dynamic, virtualized world.
To this end, the Virtual Playgrounds project will address three primary challenges: 1. Virtualization. Building on emerging technologies for virtual machines (VM), on-demand clustering, and service-oriented architectures. 2. Isolation. Building on these core virtualization mechanisms and on state-of-the-art security infrastructure, the project will investigate mechanisms to express, monitor, and enforce contractual arrangements among consumers and providers, encompassing service quality and security assurances. 3. Dynamic adaptation. The project will investigate approaches to dynamic resource management in the new context of virtual playgrounds, including mechanisms to disseminate information about resource availability and needs, match producers and consumers, and monitor and audit resource status and flow. The project will have a significant positive impact on communities building distributed computing systems in support of research and education, and on the users of those systems. The project will reduce costs and improve return on investments in cyberinfrastructure, and remove key barriers to sharing resources across organizational boundaries. The project will also deepen ties between academic researchers and national labs, provide research-training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, and increase student exposure to advanced computing environments.
