XtreemOS: A Linux-based Operating System for Large Scale Dynamic Grids

Despite the availability of various middleware, grid environments are still complex to manage, use, and program. In this talk, we present a novel grid operating system approach, promoted by the XtreemOS European project funded under the FP6 program. XtreemOS targets the management of large and very dynamic grid systems: users logged into an XtreemOS box will transparently exploit VO-managed resources through the standard POSIX interface. While much work has been done to build grid middleware on top of existing operating systems, little has been done to extend the underlying operating systems for enabling and facilitating grid computing. In this light, XtreemOS aims to be the first European step towards the creation of a true open source operating system for grid platforms. Christine Morin is a senior researcher at INRIA in the INRIA PARIS project-team, contributing to the programming of large-scale parallel and distributed systems. She has led research activities on single system image OS for high performance computing in clusters, resulting in the Kerrighed cluster OS, which has been developed in open source. Since 2006, she has been the scientific coordinator of the XtreemOS project, a four-year European integrated project aiming at developing a grid operating system. Her research interests are in operating systems, distributed systems, fault tolerance, and cluster and grid computing. She is a co-founder of the Kerlabs start-up, created in 2006 to exploit Kerrighed technology.