A persistent pool of shareable Virtual Machines will improve availability and robustness for users and lead to energy efficiency.

Goals

The main objective is to provide users with a persistent pool of Virtual Machines (up to about 50/100, according to the need, the Virtual Machine configurations, and hardware available) as opposed to the real machines that were made available through the USI Desktop Grid projects.
The main advantage is that the new Virtual Machines will be installed on a single, dedicated high-performance server and will rely on virtualization, thus allowing more freedom at the level of customization (choice of the Operating System, cores/RAM for each Virtual Machine, etc.).
As a second objective, Virtual Machines will be shareable with external institutions. In this way, ongoing and future USI projects involving external partners will benefit from a stable virtual computational platform that can be customized and allocated according to the different needs.

Benefits

Main benefits are:

• improved availability (more difficult to obtain with a Grid made exclusively of office/classroom Desktop PCs when unused),
• robustness (Virtual Machines can be easily backed-up for failure-recovery), and
• energy efficiency (the core/watt ratio on a single server is better than a similar amount of cores belonging to a cluster of Desktop PCs).

With this project USI starts introducing technologies such as Cloud computing which are expected to:

1. make it easier for users to access their Virtual Machines as opposed to having to submit Condor jobs;
2. take advantage of recent hardware developments. The latest generation servers contain several multicore CPUs providing the relative computational power of a series of Desktop PCs into a single box. The project precisely aims at complementing the USI Desktop Grid with alternative virtual resources provided on top of such a server-class machine.

Users will be USI students, researchers and staff members to USI external project partners. Web, Grid and Cloud services technologies are a key topic in both the research and education areas at USI: there is a growing need for resources to practice and experience with advanced research scenarios. Usually, only limited experiments can be performed in the real world and thus require a controlled environment to perform simulations, development and benchmarking.
A pool of customizable Virtual Machines contributes to build a highly suitable infrastructure for such experiments.

The server will be natively installed with Ubuntu Linux Server Edition. The main hypervisor used will be KVM with several management options (AQEMU, command line tools, VM-Mad). The OS installed on each Virtual Machine will be decided later, accordingly to user requirements. Each Virtual Machine will also be configured with Condor in order to be used as part of the USI Desktop Grid when idle.