[Beowulf] VMC - Virtual Machine Console

Geoff geoff at galitz.org
Wed Jan 16 05:39:02 PST 2008



I certainly cannot speak for the VMC project, but application migration  
and fault tolerance (the primary benefits other than easy access to  
heterogeneus environments from VMs) are always going to result in a  
peformance hit of some kind.  You cannot expect to do more things with no  
overhead.  There is great value in introducing HA concepts into an HPC  
cluster depending on the goals and configuration of the cluster in  
question (as always).

I cannot count the number of times a long running job (weeks) crashed,  
bumming me out as a result, even with proper checkpointing routines  
integrated into the code and/or system.


As a funny aside, I once knew a sysadmin who applied 24 hour timelimits to  
all queues of all clusters he managed in order to force researchers to  
think about checkpoints and smart restarts.  I couldn't understand why so  
many folks from his particular unit kept asking me about arrays inside the  
scheduler submission scripts and nested commends until I found that out.   
Unfortunately I came to the conclusion that folks in his unit were  
spending more time writing job submission scripts than code... well...  
maybe that is an exaggeration.

-geoff



Am 16.01.2008, 14:19 Uhr, schrieb Douglas Eadline <deadline at eadline.org>:

> While your project looks interesting and I like the idea of
> VMs, however I have not seen a good answer to the fact that VM = layers
> and in HPC layers = latency. Any thoughts? Also, is it open source?
>
> --
> Doug
>
>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I would like to announce the availability of VMC (Virtual Machine
>> Console). VMC is an attempt to provide an opensource, web-based VM
>> management infrastructure. It uses libvirt as the underlying library
>> to manage para-virtualized Xen VMs. In time we intend to scale this to
>> manage VM clusters running HPC applications.
>>
>> You can find out more on our "Introduction to VMC" page:
>>
>>    http://www.sxven.com/vmc
>>
>> List of current features and future plans:
>>
>>    http://www.sxven.com/vmc/features
>>
>> To get started, we have made available a "VMC Install" document:
>>
>>    http://www.sxven.com/vmc/gettingstarted
>>
>> We invite people to take a look at VMC and tell us what you like and
>> what you don't like. If you have any problems, questions or
>> suggestions please feel free to contact us at dev at sxven.com or post
>> them on our forum:
>>
>>    http://forum.sxven.com/
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Meng Kuan
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>
>
> --
> Doug
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-- 
-------------------------------
Geoff Galitz, geoff at galitz.org
Blankenheim, Deutschland




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