Operating System-Level Virtual Organization Support in XtreemOS

In computational grids, a virtual organization (VO) is a dynamic coupling of multiple Linux/Unix nodes for resource sharing under specific polices. Currently, VO support functionalities are generally implemented as grid middleware. However, the usability of grids is often impaired by the complexity of configuring and maintaining a new layer of security infrastructure as well as adapting to new interfaces of security enabled services. In this paper, we present an OS-level approach to provide native VO support functionalities, which is a part of XtreemOS project [18]. Our approach adopts pluggable frameworks existing in current OS as extension points to implement VO support, avoiding modification of kernel codes and easily turning traditional OSes into grid-aware ones. The performance evaluation of NAS parallel benchmarks (NPB) shows that our current implementation incurs trivial overhead on original systems.