Overview
The XenoServer project is building a public infrastructure
for wide-area distributed computing. We envisage a world in
which XenoServer execution platforms will be scattered across the
globe and available for any member of the public to submit code
for execution. The sponsor of the code will be billed for all the
resources used or reserved during the course of execution. This
will serve to encourage load balancing, limit congestion, and hopefully
even make the platform self-financing. More information about the
XenoServer project can be found here.
The XenoServer Open Platform
The Xenoserver Open Platform is creating a network of XenoServers,
running the Xen
virtual machine monitor, which allow registered clients to deploy
their - potentially unsafe - computation in exchange for (virtual,
at this stage) money. Our paper Controlling
the Xenoserver Open Platform at OPENARCH 2003 provides an overview
of the platform.
Global Public Computing describes the vision and architecture
in more detail.
Our research focuses on five key problems which arise when
building a global network of Xenoservers that are open to the public.
- Resource discovery: how does a client of the platform
discover which server (or group of servers) to use? How do they
describe their requirements to the platform? (See our paper at
HPDC
2003 for initial work)
- Resource management: how can control be exercised, in
terms of which clients are able to use which resources and to
what degree? How can the policies of the federated entities (e.g.
server owners, local network administrators, ISPs, infrastructural
authorities, and law enforcement agencies) that may wish to influence
such decisions be interleaved? (Papers currently under submission)
- Service deployment: how can clients be allowed to fully
customize the execution environments in which their services are
deployed? How can users configure and build their environments
once, and then efficiently launch them on large numbers of machines
around the world? Our paper "Global-scale
service deployment in the XenoServer platform" in the First
Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems (WORLDS '04) summarizes
our work.
- Reputation management and auditing: in a global deployment,
how do clients identify rogue servers and servers identify rogue
clients? How do server operators respond if a rogue client uses
their machines for nefarious purposes? (See our position papers
at the First
International Conference on Trust Management, Second
IEEE International Workshop on Trust and Privacy in Digital Business),
and Second
International Conference on Trust Management
- Distributed storage management: how do clients access
the data that they require? How do they locate suitable operating
system images and configurations to boot over Xen? (See our paper
at the 2002
International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Computing for our initial
work)
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