Integrating Virtual Execution Environments into Peer-to-Peer Desktop Grids

In this paper, we present an approach to provide different execution environments within Omnivore, our peer-to-peer based scheduling system for operating a pool of unused desktop computers as a desktop Grid, and integrating the desktop Grid into a larger Grid environment via the Grid Way meta-scheduler. The proposed approach is based on extending Omnivore to support virtualization technologies. A new plug-in infrastructure allows us to plug in different kinds of execution modules (including virtual machines) and select the most adequate execution environment for a job at run time. Since each job runs in its own virtual machine containing the required operating system, software and data, administrative efforts are reduced, security is improved, ease of use of the resources is enhanced, and utilization of the resources is increased. Experimental results are presented to indicate that there is a small overhead in using the proposed approach, but for long running jobs it is negligible.