Speakers
Mr
Christopher Hollowell
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)Mr
Robert Petkus
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Description
The RHIC/ATLAS Computing Facility (RACF) processor farm at Brookhaven
National Laboratory currently provides over 7200 cpu cores (over 13 million
SpecInt2000 of processing power) for computation. Our ability to supply this
level of computational capacity in a data-center limited by physical space,
cooling and electrical power is primarily due to the availability of increasingly
dense multi-core x86 cpu's. In this era of dense and inexpensive multi-core
processors, the use of system virtualization has become increasingly important.
By virtualizing a single multi-core server into many, one can minimize the
impact of operating system and service failures. Virtualization can also serve
as a useful tool in the elimination of resource contention issues on compute
nodes. For these reasons, we have split a number of our multi-core systems
into virtual Condor batch, interactive and testbed components with Xen. The
flexibility offered by virtualization comes with a price, however, a new level of
configuration management complexity.
This presentation will discuss our experiences with Xen. In particular, we will
cover our development of a custom software toolkit to simplify Xen configuration
management. This has allowed us to integrate Xen deployments with our
existing, automated OS provisioning system and can potentially lead to the
virtualization to thousands of hosts.
Primary author
Dr
Tony Chan
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Co-authors
Mr
Alexander Withers
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Mr
Christopher Hollowell
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Mr
James Pryor
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Mr
Richard Hogue
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Mr
Robert Petkus
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Yingzi wu
(Brookhaven National Laboratory)
