1. Sky Computing on FutureGrid and Grid’5000
Pierre Riteau1, Mauricio Tsugawa2, Andrea Matsunaga2, José Fortes2, Tim Freeman3, David LaBissoniere4, Kate Keahey3,4
1 Université de Rennes 1, IRISA/INRIA Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique
2 University of Florida Argonne National Labs University of Chicago Computation Institute
Introduction
Architecture
VM Image Propagation Mechanisms
Sky computing is an emerging computing model where resources from multiple cloud providers are leveraged to create large scale distributed infrastructures.
Our Sky Computing deployment makes use of:
Xen to minimize platform (hardware and operating system stack) differences
Nimbus to offer VM provisioning and contextualization services (contextualization automatically assigns roles and configures VMs)
ViNe, a virtual network based on an IP-overlay, to enable all-to-all communication between virtual machines spread across multiple clouds
Hadoop for parallel fault-tolerant execution and dynamic cluster extension
To deploy virtual clusters, each VM requires an independent replica of a common VM image. Nimbus transfers a copy of the required VM image to each VM host (a step called propagation), using SCP from a single repository. This propagation scheme doesn’t scale with the number of VMs as it is limited by the repository disk or network bandwidth. To overcome this problem, we developed two new propagation mechanisms.
The first one leverages the TakTuk and Kastafior tools developed at INRIA to create a broadcast chain used to transfer image data. The second one relies on Copy-on-Write capabilities of the Xen hypervisor.
This work uses resources across two experimental projects: FutureGrid and Grid’5000. This showcases not only the capabilities of the experimental platforms, but also their emerging collaboration.
The two platforms are used to create a Sky Computing environment. To validate our approach in a real-world scenario, we run a MapReduce version of a popular bioinformatics application (BLAST). However, any kind of distributed application can be run on these infrastructures.
Hadoop
MapReduce App (e.g. BLAST)
Distributed
Application
(e.g. MPI BLAST)
ViNe
Cloud A
Nimbus
Cloud B
Nimbus
Cloud C
Nimbus
Experimental Testbeds
Scalability
FutureGrid is an experimental testbed for grid and cloud research. It is distributed over 6 sites in the US and offers more than 5,000 cores.
Grid’5000 is an experimental testbed for research in large-scale parallel and distributed systems. It is distributed over 9 sites in France and offers more than 5,500 cores.
The above graph compares instantiation times of virtual clusters using different propagation mechanisms. In the SCP and TakTuk cases, the image is compressed and is 2.2GB in size (12 GB uncompressed). In the QCOW case, the 12GB image is pre-propagated on all hypervisors. Propagation consists in creating a new Copy-On-Write volume and contextualizing the virtual cluster.
We deployed a Sky Computing infrastructure consisting of 1114 CPU cores (457 VMs) distributed over 3 sites in FutureGrid and 3 sites in Grid’5000 (OGF-29 demo, Chicago, IL, June 2010).
ViNe router
San Diego
Rennes
Grid’5000 firewall
VMs
Conclusion
University of Florida
Lille
The Sky Computing model allows the creation of large scale infrastructures using resources from multiple cloud providers. These infrastructures are able to run embarrassingly parallel computation with high performance. Our work shows how it is possible to federate multiple infrastructures and improve the speed of virtual cluster creation, using experimental testbeds in the US and in France as an example.
Grid’5000
FutureGrid
Queue ViNe Router
University of Chicago
Sophia
Grid’5000
FutureGrid
Sponsors and Acknowledgments
This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. OCI , IIP and CNS and in part by the MCS Division subprogram of the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, SciDAC Program, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract DE-AC02-06CH The authors also acknowledge the support of the BellSouth Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or BellSouth Foundation. Experiments were carried out using the Grid'5000 experimental testbed, being developed under the INRIA ALADDIN development action with support from CNRS, RENATER and several Universities as well as other funding bodies (see