The goal of this project is to explore an approach in a break with current services-oriented principles (OGSA) developed in grids to jointly enhance their security, performance controllability and fault tolerance. The aim is to build and study simple grids, based on efficient concepts, by integrating recent communication standards. VIF will develop a new paradigm for resource control in grids to instantiate the concept of confined virtual clusters.
The global infrastructure (computers, disks, networks) in thus partitioned in virtual infrastructures (VIF) dynamically composed. These VIF are multiplexed in time and space and are isolated and protected.. The project is based on network and system virtualization, bandwidth sharing, cryptographic identifiers concepts and on the IPv6 and HIP protocols.
The proposal will be validated and evaluated on the Grid5000 testbed with biomedical applications, demanding in security , performance and reliability. Comparison with Globus and Planetlab approaches and demonstration of functional tranparence for the application will be the goals of the experiments.
A PDF description of the project can be found here
The HIPernet model - the roots of VIF project - was presented at the
IEEE international GRID2005 workshop of the SUPERCOMPUTING SC05 conference in
november 2005 - paper(.pdf) and slides (.pdf)