Towards Virtual Distributed Environments

Research Areas: End System Security, Network Security,

Principal Investigator: Dongyan Xu

Despite the rapid growth of distributed shared infrastructures such as PlanetLab and the Grid, a gap exists between the current practice and their full potential. Especially, many users wish to obtain their “own space” with full privilege in a shared infrastructure to run arbitrary distributed applications. This research introduces the concept of “virtual distributed environments” (VDEs) as a new sharing paradigm for distributed infrastructures. Based on virtualization technologies, VDEs are autonomic, mutually isolated entities, providing individual users with privileged, customized, and confined distributed environments. To realize this vision, the following new research challenges are being addressed: (1) distributed environment virtualization and logistics, (2) shepherded self-adaptation of virtual distributed environments, and (3) trusted monitoring and logging of virtual distributed environments. Solutions to these challenges are evaluated in a number of real-world application scenarios, including computer system emulation for education, e-Science service for the nanotechnology research community, and virtual playgrounds for Internet worm observation, investigation, and defense. In particular, the research and education activities of this work are closely related. Leveraging the research results, an education platform is being developed for distributed and network systems emulation. It provides students with hands-on system experience that would otherwise require expensive, dedicated equipment. This research will open the door to new opportunities for application/service deployment and distributed system experimentation. The realization of VDE will encourage public use of the emerging cyberinfrastructure by accommodating a wide range of science and engineering activities including education and research portals, virtual collaboratories, and cyber-defense testing grounds.

Keywords: virtual systems