The Océano Project - A Multi-Domain Cluster for a Computing Utility

Abstract

The Océano project is developing a prototype of a scaleable infrastructure that enables multienterprise hosting on a virtualized collection of hardware resources. Hosted customers increasingly require support for peak loads that are orders of magnitude larger than what they experience in their normal steady state, particularly for commercial Web workloads. Océano provides a hosting environment with fast response time in adjusting the resources (bandwidth, servers, and storage), assigned to each hosted customer, to the dynamically fluctuating workload. It creates dynamically carved domain clusters for each hosted enterprise, and introduces high levels of automation to control resources. Our objective is to research hosting architectures that enable high availability and dynamic scalability, for delivering networked applications and services, and are capable of handling large surges in traffic. We have implemented a pilot over a set of 50 Linux and 6 AIX servers.