Today Malgorzata Steinder from IBM T. J. Watson Research Center gived an excellent talk “Reducing systems management complexity using server virtualization technology”. Margorzata Steinder is leading the team at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center that is collaborating with our research group at BSC under the Adaptive Systems BSC-IBM SOW. We are very happy to have Gosia with us in Barcelona during this two days.

Gosia presented us how server virtualization opens up a range of new possibilities for datacenter management, through the availability of new automation mechanisms that can be exploited to manage software within virtual machines. Server virtualization permits innovative ways of software distribution inside pre-installed, pre-wired, and pre-configured freeze-dried disk images. Server virtualization also enables powerful and flexible autonomic control, through management software that maintains the system in a desired state in the face of changing workload and demand.

Nowadays, business and scientific organizations have a large amount of critical workflow processes that depend upon a set of heterogeneous applications. This set of applications can range from transactional applications, with databases, to non-interactive applications such as those that perform scientific CPU-intensive computing, document indexing or intensive I/O. In order to efficiently execute all these kinds of applications, a new execution environment is required to manage the available resources and simplify the development and integration of different types of applications and services. These middleware components are of crucial importance for new systems and architectures because of their impact on the quality of the service offered by the application.

The EEDC 2007 workshop provides an open forum for students to present discuss issues, directions, and results that will shape the future of execution environments for High-Performance Distributed Systems.

The EEDC 2007 workshop takes a broad view of the Execution Environments for High-Performance Distributed Systems area and solicits contributions from many fields, including, but not limited to, new middleware architectures, management and control of self-* middleware, replication and file management, benchmarking and performance measurement, distributed technologies, interaction of hardware and software development. We particularly encourage contributions containing highly original ideas, new approaches, and/or groundbreaking results.

Proceedings: First Workshop on Execution Environments for Distributed Computing. 68 pages. Lulu Ed. 2007. ISBN: 978-1-84799-878-1