Work in progress -a dual mode remote laboratory system supporting both real-time and batch controls by making use of virtual machines

This paper describes a dual mode remote laboratory system for an educational hardware experiment. There are two different approaches, namely real-time and batch modes, which control a laboratory system remotely. In the real-time mode, the spatially distributed hardware and test apparatuses are occupied by users during entire experiment periods exclusively. It gives the users interactive and real-laboratory like test environments, but the physical number of platforms will give the system usage limit. As for the batch mode approach, this mode resolves such shortcomings and achieves efficient equipment sharing among concurrent users, but the response-time is rather sacrificed. As neither of them does solve the problems, new remote laboratory environment which resolves the time restriction and the spatial restriction is proposed. The virtual machine (VM) technology has been employed to resolve these problems. As the VM controller allocates both real-time mode VMs and batch mode VMs dynamically, an efficient sharing of apparatuses and an improved interactivity can be achieved.