Virtual Private Grid :
A Command Shell for Utilizing Hundreds of Machines Efficiently

Overview

Virtual Private Grid (VPG) is a command shell that allows a user to harness hundreds of machines efficiently and easily. More specifically, VPG provides the following functions.

Nicknaming (VPG gives each machine a unique name)
Job submission to a nicknamed machine
Redirection from/to a file on a nicknamed machine
Network pipe between nicknamed machines

Here are some examples of the remote job submission with VPG.

command@host executes the command command on host host.
tar@hostA -c file | tar@hostB x compresses the file on hostA, transfers it to hostB, and extracts it on hostB.

Comparison with Other Tools

VPG differs from existing job submission tools (e.g, rsh, SSH) in that it semi-automatically works around restrictions imposed by administrators (e.g., private IP, firewall, DHCP client).

For example, when submitting a job to a machine behind a firewall with existing tools, you usually need to first log onto a gateway machine and then onto the target.

% ssh gateway
% rsh tuba ls

One the other hand, using VPG, you can directly submit a job only by specifying the target with its nickname.

% ls@tuba

License

This software is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Download

(Nov 14, 2003) Virtual Private Grid (Version 0.2)
(Mar 12, 2003) Virtual Private Grid (Version 0.1)

This version of VPG is intended to run on Unix-like systems. In particular, we have test VPG on the following platforms:

Linux on x86 processors
Solaris on SPARC processors

VPG should also run on other systems, provided GNU systems (e.g., gcc, make) and POSIX threads are available.

Manuals

Related Work

Papers

Kenji Kaneda, Kenjiro Taura, and Akinori Yonezawa. Virtual Private Grid : A Command Shell for Utilizing Hundreds of Machines Efficiently. In the 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid), May 2002. (To appear after revision in Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS2003)) (pdf) (ps) link to FGCS
Kenji Kaneda, Kenjiro Taura, and Akinori Yonezawa. Virtual Private Grid (VPG) : A Command Shell for Utilizing Remote Machines Efficiently (In Japanese). In IPSJ SIG Notes (HPC-87), July 2001.

Kenji Kaneda

kaneda@yl.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Virtual Private Grid :A Command Shell for Utilizing Hundreds of Machines Efficiently