Introducing Virtual Private Overlay Network services in large scale Grid infrastructures

摘要

—The computational Grid concept is gaining greatpopularity as the best way to deliver access to a wide rangeof distributed computing and data resources. But, as Gridsmove from an experimental phase to real production andtheir deployment in the Internet significantly increases,controlling the security of a Grid application becomesimperative. The most significant Grid security issue is thatthe different sites composing the Grid will generally bemanaged by different organizations each with their ownsecurity mechanisms and policies. This makes anycommunication security arrangement on the entitiesparticipating to the Grid generally more difficult than ifthey were on the same LAN. In this paper, we propose anovel network resource abstraction for delivering dynamicon-demand Virtual Private Overlay connection services,into large-scale Grid environments. Such facility provides toGrid applications an illusion of dedicated layer-2 LANconnections that are fully comparable to a private networkin performance, reliability, security and Quality of Service,but also provide topology and control plane virtualization toensure better isolation also at the protocol and addressspace level. It may represent a technological breakthroughthat can transform the overall connection paradigm inmodern Grids, by reducing infrastructure costs, with theelimination of private circuits and long-distance directconnections, and increasing network coverage and flexibilityby leveraging the Internet usage. As a proof of concept, theproposed facility has been implemented in a GridInformation Service prototype which was successfully testedon a small dedicated testbed infrastructure.