The job and service-oriented paradigm of the Grid enables a wide spectrum of applications to share the massive computational power across the Internet. In this talk, I will present a complementary paradigm of virtual distributed environments to accommodate arbitrary parallel/distributed applications that are hard to map to jobs or service instances, applications that require customized execution and network environments, and applications that require strong containment of risk and security impact. Building on virtual machine and virtual network technologies, we have developed VIOLIN, a middleware system that enables mutually isolated virtual distributed environments in a shared distributed infrastructure like the Grid and PlanetLab. Evaluation results in a number of real-world application scenarios (including computer system education, nanoHUB, and Internet worm investigation) will be presented to demonstrate the practicality and soundness of VIOLIN environment virtualization techniques.

Professor Xu's research is on protection, management, and quality of service of next generation distributed systems. He leads the Lab for Research in Emerging Network and Distributed Services (FRIENDS). He has conducted projects in overlay and peer-to-peer networks, autonomic Grid computing middleware, and mobile pervasive applications and services.

Especially, his group has been investigating runtime environment virtualization models and technologies for shared distributed infrastructures. The goal is to protect a shared infrastructure from un-trusted applications running on top of it and vice versa. Their research results have also been effectively applied to the containment, emulation, and analysis of network attacks launched by human or malware.

Dongyan Xu is the Year 2000 recipient of C.L. and Jane W-S. Liu Award in the Department of Computer Science at UIUC. He is a member of ACM, USENIX, IEEE, and IEEE Communications Society. He is affiliated with the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) and e-Enterprise Center. His research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Microsoft Research, and Purdue Research Foundation.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Dongyan Xu (2006), "Middleware Support for Virtual Distributed Environments in a Shared Distributed Infrastructure," https://nanohub.org/resources/1217.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. cyberinfrastructure
2. research seminar