Multi-site virtual cluster: A user-oriented, distributed deployment and management mechanism for grid computing environments

Abstract. Grid computing is a promising technology for utilizing dis-tributed computing resources seamlessly. However, it is still difficult for end-users to deploy and manage their own computing environments into large number of distributed locations easily and rapidly. Recent grid technologies do not address the problems involved in distributed deploy-ment and management of grid-enabled system programs; they do not allow end-users to obtain computing resources dynamically from differ-ent locations and organizations, and to build their computing systems with them easily and scalably. Therefore, we propose a user-oriented, distributed deployment and management mechanism for grid comput-ing systems, based on multi-site virtual clusters. It enables end-users to easily configure grid computing environments on distributed comput-ing resources through their own large-scale clusters of virtual machines. It is composed of inter-domain resource control protocols, resource vir-tualization technologies including virtual machines and virtual private networks, and scalable virtual node management mechanisms. It allows greater autonomy for end-users in obtaining and utilizing distributed computing resources from different organizations. We developed a pro-totype implementation of the proposed mechanism in order to confirm its validity in WAN environments. Our experiments showed that users could rapidly create large-scale multi-site virtual clusters, and customize their virtual nodes easily and quickly under WAN latencies.