Distributed application management using Plush

Recent computing trends have shown an increase in the demand for large-scale, distributed, federated computing environments. Two of the more popular environments that have emerged are the grid and PlanetLab. At a high level, these systems are similar in many ways; both are comprised of a set of heterogeneous interconnected machines that allows secure resource sharing for a variety of different users and applications. However, at a lower level, the systems are very distinct in the sense that they were designed to solve different types of problems, and therefore have fundamental differences that make it difficult to develop and deploy applications on both platforms. As a result, application designers and researchers create software that runs on either the grid or PlanetLab, but not both. We propose to solve this problem by describing a common abstraction for both PlanetLab and grid applications. Further, we present Plush - a tool that implements the distributed application abstraction by providing a pluggable and extensible infrastructure allowing users to customize their environment for running experiments on both PlanetLab and the grid.