Elsevier Future Generation Computer Systems 2006 Seamless Live Migration of Virtual Machines over the MAN/WAN

The “VM Turntable ” demonstrator at iGRID 2005 pioneered the integration of Virtual Machines (VMs) with deterministic “lightpath ” network services across MAN/WAN. The results provide for a new stage of virtualization—one for which computation is no longer localized within a data center but rather can be migrated across geographical distances, with negligible downtime, transparently to running applications and external clients. A noteworthy data point indicates that a live VM was migrated between Amsterdam, NL and San Diego, USA with just 1 to 2 seconds of application downtime. When compared to intra-LAN local migrations, downtime is only about 5-10 times greater despite 1,000 times higher round-trip-times

Building and measuring a high performance network architecture

Once a year, the SC conferences present a unique opportunity to create and build one of the most complex and highest performance networks in the world. At SC2000, large-scale and complex local and wide area networking connections were demonstrated, including large-scale distributed applications running on different architectures. This project was designed to use the unique opportunity presented at SC2000 to create a testbed network environment and then use that network to demonstrate and evaluate high performance computational and communication applications. This testbed was designed to incorporate many interoperable systems and services and was designed for measurement from the very beginning. The end results were key insights into how to use novel, high performance networking technologies and to accumulate measurements that will give insights into the networks of the future