In Virtualized Environments

Cluster computing is going through an evolution from single processor systems to multi core SMP systems. This has resulted in lower cost/performance ra-tio for the commodity of the shelf clusters (COTS). Compute farms comprising of clusters of commodity-off-the-shelf processors tend to become heterogeneous over time. Different CPU architectures, memory capacities, communication and I/O interfaces of the participating compute nodes often result in under or over utilization of the compute resources. This trend has coincided with the resurgence of virtualization technology. The virtualization technology is receiving widespread adoption mainly due to the potential benefits of server consolidation and isolation, flexibility, security and fault tolerance. Virtualization also offers other benefits, which include develop-ment/testing of applications, live migration and load balancing. Virtualization has also generated considerable interest in High Performance Computing (HPC) community dealing with COTS. This is mainly due to the reasons of high avail