A Communication Relay Mechanism toward Virtual Cluster Computing on the Grid

Recently, Grid computing has gathered the attention as a means to efficiently and effectively utilize computational resources among multiple organizations. However, the current Grid technologies do not always provide the computational environment enough to satisfy users´ requirements because of the heterogeneity and disconnect among computational resources on the Grid. For the reason, we have been attempting to develop a new Grid middleware technology that allows for a virtual cluster composed of virtual computational resources by Xen as a virtualization technology on top of an overlay network realized by PIAX as an overlay networking technology. In this paper, we propose a communication relay mechanism that allows Xen-based virtual computational resources composing a virtual cluster to communicate with each other toward the future development of such a Grid middleware technology. The evaluation shown in the paper indicates that such a virtual cluster is feasible and could work effectively for computationally-intensive applications.