User-Level Virtual Network Support for Sky Computing

With the emergence of multiple cloud providers of Infrastructure-as-a-Service, it becomes possible to envision a near-future when high-performance computing users could combine services from different clouds to access huge numbers of resources. However, as more administrative privileges are exposed to end users, providers are required to deploy network security measures that present challenges to the network virtualization technologies that are needed to enable inter-cloud communication. This paper studies these challenges and proposes techniques to enable unmodified applications on resources across distinct clouds. The techniques are implemented in TinyViNe, an extension to ViNe, a virtual networking technology for distributed resources in different administrative domains. The results of evaluating TinyViNe on a WAN-based testbed across three sites are reported for a bioinformatics application (BLAST) and MPI benchmarks. The results confirm that TinyViNe enables cross-cloud computing while having little impact on application performance. TinyViNe also has auto-configuration and “download-and-run” capabilities for easy deployment by users who are not knowledgeable about networking.