GRID AND CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud Virtualization and Clustering - II

 UNIT 5:CLOUD VIRTUALIZATION & CLUSTERS

– Implementation levels of virtualization

– Difference between traditional and Virtual Machines
– More Beowulf Clusters
– PelicanHPC

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 Implementation Levels of Virtualization
Virtualization technology benefits the computer and IT industries by enabling users to
share expensive hardware resources by multiplexing VMs on the same set of hardware
hosts.
Virtual workspaces:
– An abstraction of an execution environment that can be made dynamically available to authorized
clients by using well-defined protocols,
App App App
– Resource quota (e.g. CPU, memory share),
– Software configuration (e.g. O/S, provided services).
OS OS OS
• Implement on Virtual Machines (VMs):
– Abstraction of a physical host machine,
– Hypervisor intercepts and emulates instructions Hypervisor

from VMs and allows management of VMs.

– VMWare, Xen, etc. Hardware
• Provide infrastructure API:
– Plug-ins to hardware/support structures Virtualized Stack

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Virtual Machines
• VM technology allows multiple virtual machines to run on
a single physical machine.
App App App App App
Xen
Guest OS Guest OS Guest OS
(Linux) (NetBSD) (Windows)
VMWare
VM VM VM
UML
Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) / Hypervisor
Denali
Hardware
etc.
Performance: Para-virtualization (e.g. Xen) is very close to raw physical performance!

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Virtualization in General
Advantages of virtual machines:
– Run operating systems where the physical hardware is unavailable,
– Easier to create new machines, backup machines, etc.,
– Software testing using “clean” installs of operating systems and software,
– Emulate more machines than are physically available,
– Timeshare lightly loaded systems on one host,
– Debug problems (suspend and resume the problem machine),
– Easy migration of virtual machines (shutdown needed or not).
– Run legacy systems!

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What is the purpose and benefits?
• Cloud computing enables companies and applications, which are system
infrastructure dependent, to be infrastructure-less.
• By using the Cloud infrastructure on “pay as used and on demand”, all of us
can save in capital and operational investment!
• Clients can:
– Put their data on the platform instead of on their own desktop PCs and/or on their
own servers.
– They can put their applications on the cloud and use the servers within the cloud to
do processing and data manipulations etc.
– In computing, virtualization means to create a virtual version of a device
or resource, such as a server, storage device, network or even an
operating system where the framework divides the resource into one or
more execution environments.
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 Difference between Traditional and Virtual machines
• A traditional computer runs with a host operating system specially tailored for its hardware
architecture
• After virtualization, different user applications managed by their own operating systems (guest
OS) can run on the same hardware, independent of the host OS.
• The Virtualization layer is the middleware between the underlying hardware and virtual machines
represented in the system, also known as virtual machine monitor (VMM) or hypervisor.

With sufficient storage,

any computer platform can
be installed in another
host computer, even if
they use processors with
different instruction sets
and run with distinct
operating systems on the
same hardware.

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Virtualization Layers
The virtualization software creates the abstraction of VMs by
interposing a virtualization layer at various levels of a
computer system.
Common virtualization layers include:
1. the instruction set architecture (ISA) level,
2. hardware level,
3. operating system level,
4. library support level, and
5. application level

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Virtualization Ranging from Hardware to Applications in Five Abstraction Levels

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1.Virtualization at Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) level:
• At the ISA level, virtualization is performed by emulating a given ISA by the ISA of the host machine.
Instruction set emulation leads to virtual ISAs created on any hardware machine. e.g, MIPS binary code
can run on an x-86-based host machine with the help of ISA emulation.
• With this approach, it is possible to run a large amount of legacy binary code written for various
processors on any given new hardware host machine.
• code interpretation – dynamic binary translation - virtual instruction set architecture (V-ISA)
• Advantage:
• It can run a large amount of legacy binary codes written for various processors on any given new
hardware host machines
• best application flexibility
• Shortcoming & limitation:
• One source instruction may require tens or hundreds of native target instructions to perform its
function, which is relatively slow.
• V-ISA requires adding a processor-specific software translation layer in the complier.

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2.Virtualization at Hardware Abstraction level:
• Hardware-level virtualization is performed right on top of the bare hardware.
• On the one hand, this approach generates a virtual hardware environment for a
VM.
• On the other hand, the process manages the underlying hardware through
virtualization.
• The idea is to virtualize a computer’s resources, such as its processors, memory
and I/O devices. The intention is to upgrade the hardware utilization rate by
multiple users concurrently.
Advantage:

• Has higher performance and good application isolation

Shortcoming & limitation:

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Very expensive to implement (complexity) 11
3.Virtualization at Operating System (OS) level:
• OS-level virtualization creates isolated containers on a single physical server
and the OS instances to utilize the hardware and software in data centers. The
containers behave like real servers.
• OS-level virtualization is commonly used in creating virtual hosting
environments to allocate hardware resources among a large number of
mutually distrusting users.
Advantage:
• Has minimal startup/shutdown cost, low resource requirement, and high
scalability; synchronize VM and host state changes.
Shortcoming & limitation:
• All VMs at the operating system level must have the same kind of guest OS
• Poor application flexibility and isolation.
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Virtualization at OS Level

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 Advantages of OS Extension for Virtualization

1. VMs at OS level has minimum startup/shutdown costs

2. OS-level VM can easily synchronize with its environment

Disadvantage of OS Extension for Virtualization

•All VMs in the same OS container must have the same or similar
guest OS, which restrict application flexibility of different VMs on
the same physical machine.

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4.Library Support level:
• Since most systems provide well-documented APIs, such an interface
becomes another candidate for virtualization.
• Virtualization with library interfaces is possible by controlling the
communication link between applications and the rest of a system through API
hooks.
• The software tool WINE has implemented this approach to support Windows
applications on top of UNIX hosts.
• Another example is the vCUDA which allows applications executing within
VMs to leverage GPU hardware acceleration.
Advantage:
• It has very low implementation effort
Shortcoming & limitation:
• poor application flexibility and isolation
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5.User-Application Level
• Virtualization at the application level virtualizes an application as a VM. On a traditional OS, an
application often runs as a process.
• Therefore, application-level virtualization is also known as process-level virtualization.
• The most popular approach is to deploy high level language (HLL) VMs. In this scenario, the
virtualization layer sits as an application program on top of the operating system, and the layer
exports an abstraction of a VM that can run programs written and compiled to a particular
abstract machine definition.
• Other forms of application-level virtualization are known as application isolation, application
sandboxing, or application streaming.
Advantage:
• has the best application isolation
Shortcoming & limitation:
• low performance, low application flexibility and high implementation complexity.

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User-Application Level Virtualization

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Virtualization Structures/Tools and Mechanisms
• In general, there are three typical classes of VM architecture.
• Figure on slide 7 showed the architectures of a machine before and after virtualization.
• Before virtualization, the operating system manages the hardware.
• After virtualization, a virtualization layer is inserted between the hardware and the
operating system. In such a case, the virtualization layer is responsible for converting
portions of the real hardware into virtual hardware.
• Therefore, different operating systems such as Linux and Windows can run on the same
physical machine, simultaneously.
• Depending on the position of the virtualization layer, there are several classes of VM
architectures, namely the hypervisor architecture, para-virtualization, and host-based
virtualization.
• The hypervisor is also known as the VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor). They both perform
the same virtualization operations.

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Hypervisor
• A hypervisor is a hardware virtualization technique allowing multiple operating
systems, called guests to run on a host machine. This is also called the Virtual
Machine Monitor (VMM).
Type 1: bare metal hypervisor
• sits on the bare metal computer hardware like the CPU, memory, etc.
• All guest operating systems are a layer above the hypervisor.
• The original CP/CMS hypervisor developed by IBM was of this kind.
Type 2: hosted hypervisor
• Run over a host operating system.
• Hypervisor is the second layer over the hardware.
• Guest operating systems run a layer over the hypervisor.
• The OS is usually unaware of the virtualization
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 Full Binary Translation and Host-based Virtualization
• Depending on implementation technologies, hardware virtualization VM
architectures can be classified into two categories:
– Full virtualization and
– Host-based virtualization.

• Full virtualization does not need to modify the host OS. It relies on
binary translation to trap and to virtualize the execution of certain
sensitive, non virtualizable instructions.
• In a host-based system, both a host OS and a guest OS are used.
A virtualization software layer is built between the host OS and guest
OS.
• These two classes of VM architecture are introduced next.
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 Binary Translation of Guest OS Requests Using a VMM
• This approach was implemented by
VMware and many other software
companies.
• VMware puts the VMM at Ring 0 and the
guest OS at Ring 1. The VMM scans the
instruction stream and identified the
privileged, control- and behavior sensitive
instructions.
• When these instructions are identified, they
are trapped into the VMM, which emulates
the behavior of these instructions.
• The method used in this emulation is called
binary translation. Therefore, full
virtualization combines binary translation
and direct execution.
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 Host-Based Virtualization
• An alternative VM architecture is to install a virtualization
layer on top of the host OS. This host OS is still responsible
for managing the hardware.
• This host-based architecture has some distinct advantages.
First, the user can install this VM architecture without
modifying the host OS. The virtualizing software can rely on
the host OS to provide device drivers and other low-level
services. This will simplify the VM design and ease its
deployment.
• Second, the host-based approach appeals to many host
machine configurations. Compared to the hypervisor/VMM
architecture, the performance of the host-based architecture
may also be low.

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 Para-virtualization
• Para-virtualization needs to
modify the guest operating
systems.
• A para-virtualized VM
provides special APIs
requiring substantial OS
modifications in user
applications.
• Performance degradation is a
critical issue of a virtualized
system.
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Full Virtualization vs. Para-Virtualization
Full virtualization
• Does not need to modify guest OS, and critical instructions are emulated by
software through the use of binary translation.
• VMware Workstation applies full virtualization, which uses binary translation to
automatically modify x86 software on-the-fly to replace critical instructions.
Advantage: no need to modify OS.
Disadvantage: binary translation slows down the performance.
Para virtualization
• Reduces the overhead, but cost of maintaining a paravirtualized OS is high.
• The improvement depends on the workload.
• Para virtualization must modify guest OS, non-virtualizable instructions are
replaced by hyper calls that communicate directly with the hypervisor or VMM.
• Para virtualization is supported by Xen, Denali and VMware ESX.
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 The XEN Architecture
• Xen is an open source
hypervisor program developed
by Cambridge University. Xen is
a micro-kernel hypervisor, which
separates the policy from the
mechanism.
• Xen does not include any
device drivers natively . It just
provides a mechanism by which
a guest OS can have direct
access to the physical devices.
• As a result, the size of the Xen
hypervisor is kept rather small.
Xen provides a virtual
environment located between
the hardware and the OS.

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Virtualization of CPU, Memory, and I/O Devices
CPU Virtualization
• A VM is a duplicate of an existing computer system in which a majority of the VM
instructions are executed on the host processor in native mode. Thus, unprivileged
instructions of VMs run directly on the host machine for higher efficiency. Other critical
instructions should be handled carefully for correctness and stability.
• The critical instructions are divided into three categories: privileged instructions, control–
sensitive instructions, and behavior-sensitive instructions.
• Privileged instructions execute in a privileged mode and will be trapped if executed outside
this mode.
• Control-sensitive instructions attempt to change the configuration of resources used.
Behavior-sensitive instructions have different behaviors depending on the configuration of
resources, including the load and store operations over the virtual memory.

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• A CPU architecture is virtualizable if it supports the ability to run the
VM’s privileged
• and unprivileged instructions in the CPU’s user mode while the VMM
runs in supervisor mode.
• When the privileged instructions including control- and behavior-
sensitive instructions of a VM are executed, they are trapped in the
VMM. In this case, the VMM acts as a unified mediator for hardware
access from different VMs to guarantee the correctness and stability of
the whole system. However, not all CPU architectures are virtualizable.
• RI SC CPU architectures can be naturally virtualized because all
control and behavior-sensitive instructions are privileged instructions.
• On the contrary, x86 CPU architectures are not primarily designed to
support virtualization.
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 Memory Virtualization
• Virtual memory virtualization is similar to the virtual memory support
provided by modern operating systems. I n a traditional execution
environment, the operating system maintains mappings of virtual memory to
ma chine memory using page tables, which is a one-stage mapping from
virtual memory to machine memory.
• However, in a virtual execution environment, virtual memory virtualization
involves sharing the physical system memory in RAM and dynamically
allocating it to the physical memory of the VMs.
• That means a two-stage mapping process should be maintained by the
guest OS and the VMM, respectively: virtual memory to physical memory
and physical memory to machine memory.

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 I/O Virtualization
• there are three ways to implement I/O virtualization: full device emulation,
para-virtualization, and direct I/O.
• I/O virtualization. Generally, this approach emulates well-known, real-world
devices. All the functions of a device or bus infrastructure, such as device
enumeration, identification, interrupts, and DMA, are replicated in software.
This software is located in the VMM and acts as a virtual device.
• The para-virtualization method of I/O virtualization is typically used in Xen.
It is also known as the split driver model consisting of a frontend driver and
a backend driver. It achieves beer device performance than full device
emulation, it comes with a higher CPU overhead
• Direct I/O virtualization lets the VM access devices directly. It can achieve
close-to native performance without high CPU costs.
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Diskless Beowulf Cluster - PelicanHPC
• PelicanHPC is a rapid (around 5 minutes, when you know
what you're doing) means of setting up a high performance
computing (HPC) cluster for parallel computing using MPI.
• We will see what PelicanHPC does, how to use the
released CD images to set up a HPC cluster, and some
basic examples of usage.

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PelicanHPC Installation
• PelicanHPC is a distribution of GNU/Linux that runs as a
"live CD" (or as a virtualization appliance).
• If the ISO image file is burnt to a CD/Flash Disk, the
resulting CD/Flash Disk can be used to boot a computer.
• The computer on which PelicanHPC is booted is referred
to as the "frontend node", which is the computer that the
user interacts with.

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Runing the PelicanHPC Cluster
• Once PelicanHPC is running, a script ­ "pelican_setup" ­
may be run. This script configures the frontend node as a
netboot server.
• After this has been done, other computers can boot copies
of PelicanHPC over the network.
• These other computers are referred to as "compute
nodes".
• PelicanHPC configures the cluster made up of the
frontend node and the compute nodes so that MPI­based
parallel computing may be done.
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PelicanHPC Advantages
• A "live CD" such as PelicanHPC does not use the hard
disk of any of the nodes, so it will not destroy or alter your
installed operating system.
• When the PelicanHPC cluster is shut down, all of the
computers are in their original state, and will boot back into
whatever operating system is installed.

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PelicanHPC Features
• The frontend node can be a real computer booted using a
CD, or a virtual machine that is booted using the CD
image file.
• With this second option, PelicanHPC can be used at the
same time as the normal work environment, which may be
any of the common operating systems.
• The compute nodes are normally real computers, but they
can also be virtual.

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PelicanHPC Features
• Supports MPI­based parallel computing using Fortran (77,
90), C, C++, and GNU Octave (using MPITB).
• Offers the Open MPI and LAM/MPI implementations of
MPI.
• Cluster can be resized to add or remove nodes using the
"pelican_restarthpc" command.

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PelicanHPC Features
• Easily extensible to add packages. Also easily modifiable,
since the PelicanHPC CD image is created using a single
script that uses the Debian Live system for creating a live
CD image.
• For this reason, the distributed version is basic and
lightweight.
• Versions exist for 32 bit CPUs (Pentium 4, Core, Sempron)
and for 64 bit CPUs (Opteron, Turion, Core 2, etc.)

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PelicanHPC Features
• Contains example software:
– Linpack HPL benchmark and extensive examples that use
MPITB for GNU Octave.

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Limitations and Requirements
• The compute nodes must be booted over the network.
This is an option offered by all modern networking devices
supplied with motherboards, but it often must be enabled
in the BIOS setup.
• Enable it, and give it higher priority that booting from hard
disk or other sources.
• If you have a network card that won't do netboot, it is
possible to work around this using rom­o­matic.

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PelicanHPC Pros and Cons

LiveCD for instant cluster creation

Advantages
1. Easy to use
2. A lot of built-in software
Disadvantages
3. Not persistent
4. Difficult to add software

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Worth Reading....
• http://www.pelicanhpc.org/academic_work.html
• http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pelicanhpc
• http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/
Linux-Distributions/PelicanHPC-38025.shtml
• http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Number-
Crunching-with-Pelican-HPC-2.0

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PelicanHPC Simulations

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 References
1. Kai Hwang, Geoffery C. Fox and Jack J. Dongarra, “Distributed and Cloud
Computing: Clusters, Grids, Clouds and the Future of Internet”,
2. http://klucloudseminar.weebly.com/
3. http://cloudcomputingnet.com/cloud-computing-deployment-models/
4. http://gcauble.com/products/cloud-computing/
5. http://www.levelcloud.net/why-levelcloud/cloud-education-center/advantages-
and-disadvantages-of-cloud-computing/
6. www.cse.unr.edu/~mgunes/cpe401/cpe401sp12/lect15_cloud.ppt
7. http://slideplayer.com/slide/5862268/
8. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn520239.aspx
9. http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com/2014/01/cloud-computing-defined-
characteristics-service-levels/
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Assignment #4
• Briefly Explain the Virtualization Technologies mentioned
in slide 9.

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 Thank You

Questions and Comments?

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