Virtualizing a Batch Queuing System at a University Grid Center

Abstract

Computing clusters of High Energy Physics institutes at universities are often shared between different user groups, having their own requirements concerning the computing infrastructure. Those requirements can lead to incompatibilities between the needed operating systems, software packages, access policies or different grid middlewares. Some of the above incompatibilities can be solved by providing different portal machines for each group. Incompatibilities at the level of the shared worker nodes of the cluster are, however, difficult to overcome.

In this paper, an approach to overcome this incompatibility using the virtualization technique Xen is presented. Each physical worker node hosts different virtual machines, acting as virtual worker node for every group supported at the site. Ways to integrate this into an existing batch queue are shown.

The performance of different programs used in High Energy Physics on native and virtual machines are also presented.