Nortel working with Xen for Grid Computing

Quoting from InfoWorld:

…the very nature of Grid computing is to provide resource pools that can be dynamically provisioned to jobs in the queue.

But a very exciting and NEW, related discussion is taking place around “mashups” of virtual machines and virtual network resources. This new research area is being driven by Dr. Franco Travostino — who heads Grid activities in the capacity of Director for Advanced Technology and Research at Nortel and is co-Director for the Infrastructure Area at the GGF — and who is without question one of the most interesting players on the networking side of the enterprise Grid discussion.

“In Seattle, at Supercomputer 2006, we created a demo by which we took some Xen-based virtual machines that were crunching some particular, computation-intensive tasks … and we moved them to Amsterdam,” said Travostino. “And then from Amsterdam, we moved them to Chicago, and them from Chicago back to Seattle. And in spite of the tens of thousands of miles, the impact on the applications was less than one second. So that’s pretty mind-boggling, to think about having a fully featured Linux environment running lots of applications, and teleporting all that across the world with such minimal disruption. DRAC is the “network middleware” that makes this long-haul migration possible at the network level. Specifically, DRAC puts in place a short-lived deterministic network service, on demand. As well, it preserves the sessions with any remote client.”…

Read the whole article at source.