XtreemOS can be seen as an alternative to traditional Grid middleware, facilitating the use of federated resources for scientific and business communities. XtreemOS provides for users, the vision of a large powerful single workstation environment, but removing the complex resource management issues of a Grid environment. When installed on a participating machine, XtreemOS provides for the Grid what an operating system offers for a single computer: abstraction from the hardware and secure resource sharing between different users. XtreemOS is available for PCs, clusters and mobile devices.

Program

Our second XtreemOS summit will be one day in length and organized as follows:

• In the morning:

• a tutorial: "Easing Application Execution in Grids with XtreemOS Operating System",
• open discussions.

• In the afternoon:

• community-oriented demos,
• presentations of experimental results: scientific challenges using XtreemOS.

There will be no call for papers but we will organize an XtreemOS challenge consisting in awarding a demonstration submitted by the community and showing an application running on XtreemOS (here).

Objectives

The aims of this summit are:

• To familiarize participants with the usage of the main XtreemOS services (Virtual Organization management & grid security mechanisms, application execution management, XtreemFS - distributed data storage etc.).
• To present XtreemOS Grid system from the user's point of view,

• To demonstrate some XtreemOS main functionalities,

• To provide a unique opportunity for people interested in the XtreemOS technology to meet developers, users, researchers (...) who initiated the technology, share experiences and discuss research work.

XtreemOS technology

XtreemOS system provides innovative solutions for several issues related to grid and cloud com-
puting and allow users to:
• Use the Grid like their Linux workstation,
• Run interactive and legacy applications on a Grid using POSIX and SAGA,
• Access their data transparently across the Internet with XtreemFS,
• Automatically discover computing resources matching their needs,
• Harness cluster power using Kerrighed SSI technology.

Our new Grid operating system introduces the following new technical challenges:
• Scalability: supporting hundreds of thousands of nodes and millions of users dynamically joining and leaving the Grid,
• Transparency: hiding the complexity of the Grid by distributed operating system services allowing to run new and legacy applications seamlessly,
• Interoperability: complying with all major standards such as POSIX and SAGA,
• Dependability: providing reliability and high availability through checkpointing and replication,
• Security: ensuring trust and integrity according to customizable policies.

Users logged into an XtreemOS box transparently exploit VO-managed resources through the standard POSIX interface. In contrast to middleware approaches, XtreemOS is an operating system able to execute any kind of application on the Grid, including unmodified existing applications as well as interactive applications. The XtreemOS software has been developed from scratch during a research project financed by the European Commission (FP6-IST-033576). XtreemOS is running on a wide range of hardware ranging from smartphones, PCs and Linux clusters. The PC flavor of XtreemOS runs on an unmodified Linux kernel. The cluster flavor is built upon the kerrighed technology .

XtreemOS tutorial

Our tutorial will show why XtreemOS is a system of choice for Grid users who want to easily execute their applications while taking advantage of advanced features for job management.

More information to come.

XtreemOS demos