Virtual Environments – towards new generation e-Infrastructure |
Topic leaders Norbert Meyer, meyer@man.poznan.pl ,
Radek Januszewski, radekj@man.poznan.pl (secondary contact)
Short descriptionVirtualisation is a term used for a long time in computing and networking, allowing to divide hardware resources into smaller pieces and define smaller communication channels from a bigger high bandwidth network. The growing requirements of network and grid services force service providers to deliver cheaper resources with better utilization. A way to achieve this economic parameter is virtualization. The traditional way of engineering e-Infrastructures, relying on dedicating the hardware for a single purpose and a single user group, is no longer valid due to security and political reasons. Sharing resources may lead to significant reductions in the cost of ownership and in an increased efficiency of its utilization by sharing it.
At the same time, Internet has become an increasingly important element of the global economy. This fact coupled with the trend of using shared infrastructure (Grids, Cloud Computing) and the growing importance of confidentiality and security of processed information makes the case for an isolation of customer-dedicated parts of the infrastructure. So there are two opposing trends – to share and at the same time to be secure and confidential; so the question is how do we achieve the two goals at the same time? The answer may be the technology of virtualization. The physical resources host virtual environments customised to exactly match user needs, dynamically utilizing only required resources and allowing other users to access and share the unused ones.
The proposed topics covered by this Working Group are following:
- Deploying virtual environments on demand
- Workflow of virtual machines and environments
- Reliability of virtual environments.
- Trust in virtual environments
- Accounting in virtual environments
- Real-time and scalability aspects in multi-user virtual environments
Keywords virtualization, resource management, workflows, computing on-demand, grid and cloud computing, fault-tolerance, reliability, costs
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Last Updated ( Monday, 16 February 2009 )
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