Virtual Clusters for Grid Communities

A challenging issue facing Grid communities is that while Grids can provide access to many heterogeneous resources, the resources to which access is provided often do not match the needs of a specific application or service. In an environment in which both resource availability and software requirements evolve rapidly, this disconnect can lead to resource underutilization, user frustration, and much wasted effort spent on bridging the gap between applications and resources. We show here how these issues can be overcome by allowing authorized Grid clients to negotiate the creation of virtual clusters made up of virtual machines configured to suit client requirements for software environment and hardware allocation. We introduce descriptions and methods that allow us to deploy flexibly configured virtual cluster workspaces. We describe their configuration, implementation, and evaluate them in the context of a virtual cluster representing the environment in production use by the Open Science Grid. Our performance evaluation results show that virtual clusters representing current Grid production environments can be deployed and managed efficiently, and thus can provide an acceptable platform for Grid applications.