As part of my honours project I wrote a thesis on the dynamic generation and execution of virtual machine work units on the grid.
Grid computing offers significant promise as the next generation platform which will drive large-scale e-science. However, e-scientists are faced with challenging problems when developing and deploying grid applications. This includes heterogeneous nature of grid resources that constrain the e-scientist in developing applications designed for the grid rather than the grid providing the environment for the application.
Virtualisation offers great potential in solving this issue and a number of research projects have concentrated on applying platform virtual machines to alleviate these issues. Virtualisation in high-performance computing has become a viable option for encapsulating grid applications. However utilising such architectures still requires the e-scientist to have the skills and knowledge of setting up such environments.
This thesis proposes a flexible Virtual Machine Work Unit architecture that allows e-scientists to easily package their grid applications into a virtual machine that meets the requirements of their grid application. It also documents the utilities which have been developed to launch Virtual Machine Work Units on to existing grids with minimal or no modification to existing grid infrastructure. Virtual Machine Work Units are executed like traditional grid applications without the technical and organisational constraints found in existing grid infrastructures.
The full thesis can be found here.