[Beowulf] Blue-sky cluster security [was CLuster - Mpich - tstmachines - Heeelp !!!!!!!!]

[Chris Samuel]

On Saturday 29 July 2006 13:06, Geoff Jacobs wrote:

> Just brainstorming, what would the best method be? Poach some of the
> globus stuff? A chroot scheme? Xen?

The Globus folks have some work that I saw described at CCGrid in Singapore 
this year called Workspaces [1] which is basically deploying a Xen VM to 
provide a known OS and application stack for grid jobs.

It has the added advantage that once the job is complete and results retrieved 
then the VM can be destroyed and it is out of the way.  They have separate 
filesystems for the root, usr and other areas to make it possible to mix and 
match.

The driver behind this is the age old question of grid computing that if I can 
submit a job and a meta-scheduler picks a random cluster, how can I know that 
it will have the right environment for my application ?

[1] - http://workspace.globus.org/

Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel - (03)9925 4751 - VPAC Deputy Systems Manager
 Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing http://www.vpac.org/
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