Virtual Distributed Environments in a Shared Infrastructure

A middleware system that integrates and elevates virtual machine and virtual network technologies facilitates the creation of virtual distributed environments in a shared infrastructure. Spanning multiple domains, the Grid provides for the federation, allocation, and management of heterogeneous networked resources and makes them available to a large number of users. Advances in Grid computing technology have contributed to the formation of a wide-area shared cyber infrastructure that provides opportunities for a broad spectrum of distributed and parallel computing applications to take advantage of the massive aggregate computational power available across the Internet. However, realizing the full potential of such a shared infrastructure presents significant research challenges. Many Grid users are familiar with the traditional job submission and execution model as well as the service-oriented access model as defined by th