As I complete my final year of my software engineering degree, I am fortunate enough to been accepted in to the honours stream of this degree. This stream entails the student conducting a research project during their final year alongside normal coursework and in my case another industry project.
My topic, titled Virtual Machines for Grid Computing, will look at the benefits and problems associated with virtual machine distribution, execution, and use in grid computing. This research project will allow me to gather further experience with virtualisation and virtual machine technology as well as a look into grid computing. All exciting and promising technologies in computer science. My project will be supervised by David Abramson, a Monash University Professor, and Wojtek Goscinski, a recent PHD student at Monash University.
A summary of my project follows:
Grid computing is helping e-Scientists communicate and collaborate on large scale problems by allowing them to share and access high performance computational infrastructure and databases. However, writing applications for this new environment has proved difficult because of underlying operating system and hardware differences between organisations.
Platform-level virtualisation tools, such as VMWare, Qemu and Xen, have been proposed as an appropriate solution, providing users with a virtual tailored sandboxed environment. This environment which consists of an operating system, its software and data, can be configured by the user and deployed and executed directly across the grid.
This project will explore and identify the major issues that impede users from applying virtual machines to grid computing. In particular, it will research the way a virtual machine image could be automatically constructed as the sum of its operating system, software and data, and then automatically deployed and executed on the grid.*
I look forward to this challenging year and hope that I can gain as most as I can from this project. I would like to express my gratitude to David and Wojtek for there willingness to supervise me for the duration of this project.