Extending The Linux Operating System For Grid Computing
Nur Hussein, Constantine Kolivas, Fazilah Haron, Huah Yong Chan · 2004
The emergence of metacomputing and grid technologies as a new trend in high performance computing has opened up many interesting problems in the implementation of resource-sharing and efficient scheduling of compute-intensive processes. While much work has been done to build grid services on top of existing infrastructure, little has been done to make the underlying operating system aware of these new applications. If extensions for facilitating grid computing could be built into the operating system kernel, it would simplify the job of grid service implementers in userspace for they could rely on the transparent services of the kernel for tasks such as process checkpointing and resource discovery. This paper discusses the implementation of grid-friendly extensions to the Linux operating system; process checkpointing, userspace filesystems and a fair-scheduling algorithm optimized for compute-intensive applications. The fair-scheduling algorithm is benchmarked and compared to existing Linux schedulers, and the preliminary results show an increase in system throughput with the modified scheduling algorithm.