The Scientific Byte Code Virtual Machine

Virtual machines constitute an appealing technology for Grid Computing and have proved a promising mechanism that greatly simplifies and enforces the employment of grid computer resources. While existing sandbox technologies to some extent provide secure execution environments for applications deployed in a heterogeneous platform as the Grid, they suffer from a number of problems including performance drawbacks and specific hardware requirements. This project introduces a virtual machine capable of executing platform-independent byte codes specifically designed for scientific applications. Native libraries for the most prevalent applications domains mitigate the performance penalty. As such, grid users can view this machine as a basic grid computing element and thereby abstract away the diversity of the underlying real compute elements. Regarding security, which is of great concern to resource owners, important aspects include stack isolation by using a harvard memory architecture, and no support for neither I/O nor system calls to the host system.