Nova: an approach to on-demand virtual execution environments for grids

The technique of using virtual machines for grid jobs as trusted execution environments has been hampered by the overheads involved creating the virtual machines. This paper attempts to reduce the overheads of dynamically creating and destroying the virtual environments for secure job execution. It broaches a grid architecture which we call Nova, consisting of extremely minuscule, pre-created virtual machines whose configurations could be altered with respect to the application executed within it. The benefits of the architecture are supported by experimental claims.