OAR [wiki:old:gsoc_proposal_computemode_ng]

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ComputeMode and OAR are brother and sister: Beside using OAR as one of its core components, ComputeMode indeed shares the same origin as OAR, at Grenoble's ID-IMAG laboratory. ComputeMode and OAR are both developed and maintained by the same team today.

More information about ComputeMode can be found on its web site: http://computemode.imag.fr.

ComputeMode is based on several low level features, among them:

Smart pre-boot mechanisms
Netbooting
Diskless Linux

However, ComputeMode mechanisms became old with regard to today's state of the art, and a refresh is in progress. Also, taking advantage of OS visualization technologies such as live migration is of great interest for purposes such as resilience.

Therefore this GSOC project aims at working on all those aspects, in order to provide proofs of concepts for the next generation ComputeMode the development team is currently working on.

Goals for this GSOC project

Replace the use of the TFTP protocol by HTTP in ComputeMode pre-boot mechanism and possibly move some smartness from the server to the node (iPXE/PXElinux/comboot)
Develop a iSCSI flavor of ComputeMode node environment, and provide feature comparisons and performance evaluations of such mechanism with regards to the current NFSroot node environment.
Develop a cloud-like diskless node environment for ComputeMode, providing a VMM on top of which will lay a computation environment enabling feature such as OS live migration.
If time remains, try to inter-operate ComputeMode with other compute cloud infrastructures.

All points are correlated, since our early analysis showed that 1 could be a requirement or at least an asset for 2, 2 for 3 and 3 for 4.