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Exploring Virtual Workspace Concepts in a Dynamic Universe for Condor

Quinn Lewis

ABSTRACT

Virtualization offers a cost-effective and flexible way to use and managecomputing resources. Such an abstraction is appealing in grid computing for better matching jobs (applications) to computational resources. This paper applies the virtualworkspace concept introduced in the Globus Toolkit to the Condor workloadmanagement system. It allows existing computing resources to be dynamically provisioned at run-time by users based on application requirements instead of statically atdesign-time.

INTRODUCTION

A common goal of computer systems is to minimize cost while maximizing other criteria, such as performance, reliability, and scalability, to achieve the objectives of theuser(s). In Grid computing, a scalable way to harness large amounts of computing power across various organizations is to amass several relatively inexpensive computingresources together. Coordinating these distributed and heterogeneous computingresources for the purposes of perhaps several users can be difficult. In such anenvironment, resource consumers have several varying, specific, and demandingrequirements and preferences for how they would like their applications and services toleverage the resources made available by resource providers. Resource providers mustensure the resources meet a certain quality of service (e.g. make resources securely andconsistently available to several concurrent users).In the past, control over the availability, quantity, and software configurations of resources has been limited to the resource provider. With virtualization, it becomes

possible for resource providers to offer up more control of the resources to a user withoutsacrificing quality of service to other resource consumers. Users (resource consumers)can more easily create execution environments that meet the needs of their applicationsand jobs within the policies defined by the resource providers. Such a relationship,enabled by virtualization, is both cost-effective and flexible for the resource producer andconsumer. [1]The virtual workspace term, initially coined in [2] for use with the GlobusToolkit, "is an abstraction of an execution environment that can be made dynamicallyavailable to authorized clients by using well-defined protocols". This executionenvironment can encompass several physical resources. Generically, this concept could be implemented in various ways; however, virtualization has proven itself to be a practicable implementation. [3]Condor, "is a specialized workload management system for compute-intensive jobs" [4]. Condor currently abstracts the resources of a single physical machine intovirtual machines which can run multiple jobs at the same time [5]. A "universe" is usedto statically describe the execution environment in which the jobs are expected to run.This approach assumes the resources (whether real or virtual) have to all be allocated inadvance. While there is support for adding more resources to an existing pool via theGlide-in mechanism, the user still has to dedicate the use of these other physicalresources.The purpose of this paper is to describe how a Condor execution environment(universe) can be dynamically created at run-time by users to more flexibly and cost-effectively use and manage existing resources using virtualization. Two of the unique

implementation details described in this paper are the use of Microsoft Windows andMicrosoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 for the virtual machine manager (VMM) on the hostoperating system (instead of being Linux-based using Xen or VMWare) and the use of differencing virtual hard disks. More details about virtual workspaces and similar attempts to virtualize Condor are described in Related Work. The implementation detailsof the work performed for a dynamic Condor universe are provided along with performance tests results. Future enhancements are included for making this work-in- progress more robust.

RELATED WORK

While virtualization has a number of applications for business computing andsoftware development and testing, the work outlined in this paper most directly applies totechnical computing, including Grid computing, clusters, and resource-scavengingsystems.

Grid Computing

The use of virtualization in Grid computing has been proposed before, touting the benefits of legacy application support, improved security, and the ability to deploycomputation independently of site administration. The challenges of dynamicallycreating and managing virtual machines are also described [6]. The virtual workspaceconcept [7] extended [6] to present "a unified abstraction" and address additional issuesassociated with the complexities of managing such an environment in the Grid. Two keydifferences between the Grid-related work mentioned and this paper is the emphasis ondynamically creating the execution environment at run-time and the (Microsoft)virtualization software employed.