ccgrid 2008 - keynote on XtreemOS

Christine Morin, Senior Researcher, INRIA, France

http://www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/RESO/ccgrid2008/

Beyond Grid middleware: XtreemOS Vision

Despite the availability of various middleware, Grid environments are still complex to manage, use and program. In this talk, we present a novel Grid operating system approach, promoted by the XtreemOS European project funded under the FP6 program. XtreemOS targets the management of large and very dynamic Grid systems: users logged in an XtreemOS box will transparently exploit VO-managed resources through the standard POSIX interface. While much work has been done to build Grid middleware on top of existent operating systems, little has been done to extend the underlying operating systems for enabling and facilitating Grid computing, for example, by embedding some important basic services or functionalities directly into the operating system. In this light, XtreemOS aims to be a first European step towards the creation of true open source operating system for Grid platforms. The XtreemOS operating system is composed of a consistent set of integrated Grid OS services. It is based on Linux traditional general-purpose OS, extended as needed to support VOs, and to provide appropriate interfaces to the Grid operating system services. In contrast to middleware approaches, XtreemOS is an operating system able to execute any kind of application, including unmodifyed existing applications. Both traditional scientific applications and commercial services are within XtreemOS scope.

Presentation available here

Christine Morin is senior researcher at INRIA in the INRIA PARIS project-team contributing to the programming of large scale parallel and distributed systems. She has led research activities on single system image OS for high performance computing in clusters, resulting in Kerrighed cluster OS, now developed in open source. She is the scientific coordinator of the XtreemOS project which is a 4-year European integrated project started in June 2006. She is a co-founder of Kerlabs start-up, created in 2006 to exploit Kerrighed technology. Her research interests are in operating systems, distributed systems, fault tolerance, cluster and grid computing.