Rapid and Minimally Invasive Deployment of Grid Middleware by means of Native Virtualization

Abstract. While harvesting existing resources for the grid is desirable, in practice it is rarely achieved due to heterogeneous environments, shortcomings of the middleware, and restrictive software specifications. Native virtualization allows us to increase the number of grid resources by exploiting resources otherwise not accessible. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept implementation of this approach based on the VMware virtualization software. It comprises ready-to-use virtual machine images for a gatekeeper node or Computing Element and job execution nodes or Worker Nodes that can be deployed onto an existing computing infrastructure without impairing its primary purpose. The prototype was successfully used to integrate an existing computing lab into a grid. Our measurements show that the performance penalty of native virtualization is small unless heavy use of the disk is made and therefore is negligible for many applications.