WOW: Self-Organizing Wide Area Overlay Networks of Virtual Workstations

— This paper describes WOW, a distributed system that combines virtual machine, overlay networking and peerto-peer techniques to create scalable wide-area networks of virtual workstations for high-throughput computing. The system is architected to: facilitate the addition of nodes to a pool of resources through the use of system virtual machines (VMs) and self-organizing virtual network links; to maintain IP connectivity even if VMs migrate across network domains; and to present to end-users and applications an environment that is functionally identical to a local-area network or cluster of workstations. We describe a novel, extensible user-level decentralized technique to discover, establish and maintain overlay links to tunnel IP packets over different transports (including UDP and TCP) and across firewalls. We also report on several experiments conducted on a testbed WOW deployment with 118 P2P router nodes over PlanetLab and 33 VMware-based VM nodes distributed across six firew...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Arijit Ganguly, Abhishek Agrawal, P. Oscar Boykin, Renato J. O. Figueiredo
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPDC 2006, Nodes Self-configured P2p, Virtual Machines, VMware-based VM Nodes