XtreemOS coming to a grid near you, Jun 2008

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I recently got an email about an interesting European initiative to develop a grid operating system. The package, called XtreemOS, is a 4-year research project aiming to develop a grid operating system to simplify the use, management and programming of grids.

XtreemOS core functionalities allow to securely manage computation and data resources: Virtual Organization and Security Management guarantees a secure operational environment for the Grid, covering all common requirements for information security as well as those intrinsic to the Grid; Application Execution Management allows starting, monitoring and controlling applications and selecting and allocating resources to them; and Data Management, a Grid file system (XtreemFS) targeting wide-area networks with high latencies. XtreemOS’ cluster version is based on the Kerrighed open source project (http://www.kerrighed.org), which provides a Single System Image operating system for clusters.

Additionally, XtreemOS is being comprehensively tested with a set of 11 reference applications from different sectors (aeronautics, economics, biology…) to ensure that end-user perspectives are taken into account in the design, implementation and validation of the system.

The experiments will initially be carried out on the French national grid experimental platform Grid’5000 (https://www.grid5000.fr/). We plan to extend the initial test bed to the grid in the Netherlands (DAS-3 – http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/das3/) and to the Chinese grid (CNGrid – http://www.cngrid.org/).

The first public release of XtreemOS will be available in June 2008, while demo prototypes of individual components are already available. You can find out more at http://www.xtreemos.eu.