Virtualization in Grid [Tutorial 2B]

Summary form only given, as follows. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. In grid environment where resources are generally owned by different people, communities or organizations with varied administration policies and capabilities, managing the grid resources is not a simple task. Resource brokers simplify this process by providing an abstraction layer for users to access heterogeneous resources transparently. However, discovery of grid resources that suits to the user's job requirements is always a difficult job as the probability of grid resources satisfying the user's requirements is very less. Conventionally, in order to run a job on the grid a user has to identify a set of platforms capable of running that job by the virtue of having the required installation of operating system, libraries, tools, and the configuration of environment variables, etc. In practice, the availability of such software environments will either be limited to a very narrow set, or the job has to be made compatible with an environment supported by a large resource provider, such as TeraGrid. Further, if we could identify such an environment, it is hard to guarantee that the resource will be available when needed, for as long as needed, and that user will get his or her fair share of that resource. This difficulty can be overcome by incorporating the concept of Virtualization in Grid environment that enables the creation of dynamic user defined execution environment in a grid resource.