eXludus and White Rose Grid Report Breakthrough in Cluster Virtualization

RepliCator Software Enables Adaptive Virtualization with High Efficiency and Scalability: eXludus Technologies and the White Rose Grid, a division of the White Rose Consortium of Universities comprising Leeds, Sheffield and York in the United Kingdom, today reported an important result that promises to make the virtual provisioning of applications on clusters significantly more responsive and flexible. eXludus’s RepliCator software enables applications to be dynamically deployed, on-demand, in the optimal virtual operating environment. In collaborative tests conducted on the White Rose Grid cluster at York, RepliCator’s prototype Virtual Provisioning Optimizer capability and VMware software were employed to create a virtual container within the cluster's native 64-bit Linux environment. Within this virtual container, RepliCator then launched the popular NCBI – BLAST application with its own 32-bit Windows Vista operating environment. Both the Vista virtual environment of 6 GB per image and 1 GB of human genome data were provisioned with RepliCator parallel file serving to all cluster nodes simultaneously. A total of approximately 100 GB was provisioned in under 4 minutes to all nodes across Gigabit Ethernet. Provisioning with RepliCator occurs asynchronously, overlapped with other computation so processing never stalls for network I/O. With RepliCator, virtual provisioning is no longer inevitably associated with performance-degrading overhead. RepliCator removes a significant barrier to wider adoption of virtualization on clusters. In the same tests, RepliCator's parallel file serving capability enabled the BLAST application and its Windows environment, still within the virtual container, to scale across the cluster with high efficiency. The virtually provisioned RepliCator-Vista application scaled linearly without degradation, while the same application run with NFS in the native Linux environment suffered significant performance degradation. "The White Rose Grid has been pleased to work together with eXludus Technologies to demonstrate this breakthrough in provisioning applications in conjunction with the virtual operating environments they need. In our experiments with eXludus so far, we have obtained impressive results demonstrating little or virtually no overhead," said Aaron Turner, White Rose Grid technical manager at the University of York. "We intend to investigate eXludus's technology further to support our diverse user community across the three institutions of the White Rose Grid, including support, for example, for Windows applications running efficiently on Linux clusters. The ability to efficiently use virtualization technologies will give us additional flexibility and unlock additional resources, driving down costs-per-unit of resource whilst also providing users with the experience that they want and need to further their work." “Support for virtual operating environments is of great importance in enhancing the agility of cluster and Grid computing," said Rob Walsh, Director of Grid Computing, Altair Engineering. "By teaming PBS Professional with the tools from eXludus we have made the use of Grids practical in real world applications.” "With eXludus’s innovative on-demand virtualization technology, applications can run in the exact environment for which they were designed, rather than the current ‘Tower of Babel’ software stacks. We have now demonstrated that eXludus's Virtual Provisioning Optimizer technology can provision large virtual environments transparently, efficiently, and dynamically with excellent scalability through our Parallel File Serving Optimizer," according to company founder and CEO Benoît Marchand “eXludus's approach marries Grid technology, parallel file serving and virtualization together to meet the performance, consistency and flexibility required for large-scale virtualization in real-world production environments." To download a paper describing the tests and results in detail, go to its Web site.