Virtual Organization Support within a Grid-wide Operating System

International audienceDespite the popularity of Grids, virtual organizations (VOs) have yet to become a commodity technology in modern computing environments. The complexity of managing VOs and difficulty of assuring user and VO isolation are among the major barriers to wider use. We describe the VO management approach taken by XtreemOS, a new Grid operating system with native support for VOs, which supports a wide range of computing resources, from clusters to mobiles. The security and resource control features within a conventional operating systems are extended to manage computers spread over the network. We discuss the requirements for the VO model and management within XtreemOS. We introduce an expandable VO model and a system architecture which supports it. This is implemented at the Grid level as a set of services and protocols, and within each machine via extensions and configurations of standard Linux distributions