CTU virtualization

There are several computer classrooms in our buildings at CTU Karlovo namesti. The computers are used by students throughout the day, but they are idling at night. The CPM group does research in image processing and all their experiments are very computationally and memory intensive. How to take advantage of the at night idling computers for scientific computation? There are several ways how to make the computers available while making sure the current set up for education, data and operating systems are intact. Our approach is virtualization and cloud computing. To start the project we have decided to proceed safely creating new partition and use dual boot. This will preserve the current computers settings and let us use the new partition for the cloud software and virtualization. The partition job has been done this week. The plan is to test two different virtualization approaches VMware and Eucalyptus. WMware tools will let us manage virtualized images on many computers in cluster. Similarly works the open source Eucalyptus. The WMware uses the XEN and Eucalyptus the KVN and others. Both will allow us to manage and run many different tasks. Next, we will start installing the system. Stay tuned for the next report.