Containers: a sound basis for a true single system image

Clusters of SMPs are attractive for executing shared memory parallel applications, but reconciling high performance and ease of programming remains an open issue. A possible approach is to provide an efficient single system image (SSI) operating system giving the illusion of an SMP machine. The global management of all resources to provide a true SSI remains an open issue. We introduce the concept of container as a mechanism to unify global resource management at the lowest operating system level. Higher level operating system services such as virtual memory system and file cache can be easily implemented based on containers and transparently take benefit of the whole memory resource available in the cluster.