[Beowulf] VMC - Virtual Machine Console

[Douglas Eadline]

I get the desire for fault tolerance  etc. and I like the idea
of migration. It is just that many HPC people have spent
careers getting applications/middleware as close to the bare
metal as possible. The whole VM concept seems orthogonal to
this goal. I'm curious how people are approaching this
problem.

--
Doug



>
>
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
>>> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
>>> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Doug
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>
>
>
> --
> -------------------------------
> Geoff Galitz, geoff at galitz.org
> Blankenheim, Deutschland
>
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--
Doug