DVMM: A Distributed VMM for Supporting Single System Image on Clusters

Providing single system image (SSI) on clusters has ever been one of the hot topics in the research field of parallel computer architecture, since SSI supports easier programming and administration on clusters. Currently, most SSI studies focus on the middleware level of clusters, leading to some problems of poor transparence, low performance and so on. This paper presents a novel solution to provide SSI on clusters using a distributed virtual machine monitor (DVMM) with hardware-assisted virtualization technologies. The DVMM contains some symmetrical and cooperative VMMs distributed on multi-node. The cooperation among the VMMs virtualizes the distributed hardware resources to support SSI on a cluster. Thus, the DVMM can support an unmodified legacy operating system (OS) to run transparently on a cluster. Compared with the related work, our solution has some advantages of good transparence, high performance and easy implementation.