Speaker
Oliver Oberst
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Description
Todays experiments in HEP only use a limited number of operating system flavours. Their software might only be validated on one single OS platform. Resource providers might have other operating systems of choice for the installation of the batch infrastructure. This is especially the case if a cluster is shared with other communities, or communities that have stricter security requirements. One solution would be to statically divide the cluster into separated subclusters. In such a scenario, no opportunistic distribution of the load can be achieved, resulting in a poor overall utilization efficiency.
Another approach is to make the batch system aware of virtualization, and to provide each community with its favored operating system in a virtual machine. Here, the scheduler has full flexibility, resulting in a better overall efficiency of the resources.
In our contribution, we present a lightweight concept for the integration of virtual worker nodes into standard batch systems.
We demonstrate two prototype implementations, one based on the Sun Grid Engine (SGE), the other using Maui/Torque as a batch system. Both solutions support local job as well as Grid job submission. The hypervisor currently used is XEN, a port to another system is easily envisageable. To better handle different virtual machines on the physical host, a management solution was developed and is shown.
We will present first experience from running the two prototype implementations.
In a last part, we will show the potential future use of this lightweight concept when integrated into high-level (i.e. Grid) workflows.
Primary authors
Andreas Haas
(SUN / SGE)
Guenter Quast
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Hermann Hessling
(FHTW Berlin)
Marcel Kunze
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Oliver Oberst
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Owen Synge
(DESY)
Volker Buege
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Yves Kemp
(DESY)
