Experiences with a Grid Gateway Architecture Using Virtual Machines

The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) began developing the APAC National Grid in 2004. The APAC Grid integrates several partner sites, most of which have multiple compute resources. Different APAC grid application projects require different grid middleware systems, including GT2, GT4 and LCG. In order to provide these different systems to interface to different resources at each site, it was decided to provide a single, standard grid gateway machine at each site, and to use Xen to provide a number of virtual machines to run the different grid middleware stacks, as well as other services such as grid portals and data management. In this paper we discuss the design of this system, and our experiences in deploying and using virtual machines on a single grid gateway machine for interfacing to multiple clusters at a site.