Providing Virtualization-Based Single System Image on Clusters

It is an important direction of the development of parallel computer architecture to implement single system image (SSI) on clusters, since SSI supports easier programming and administration on clusters. Currently, most SSI studies focused 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 with hardware-assisted virtualization technologies. New layer software named DVMM (distributed virtual machine monitor) is added between the OS and the cluster hardware. The DVMM contains some symmetrical and cooperative VMMs distributed on the cluster. The cooperation among the VMMs virtualizes the distributed hardware resources to support SSI on a cluster. Compared with the related work, our solution has some advantages of good transparence, high performance and easy implementation.