[ Cloud Computing ] Re: why virtualization?

Dan Kearns wrote:

>
> If the goals are to have smarter software and maximize utilization (or
> minimize power consumption for equivalent compute capacity), then why
> introduce the constant runtime overhead of virtualization instead of,
> eg using smaller more power-efficient compute-unit designs and making
> the hardware controllable by software?

What you say here 'smaller units controllable by software' is what is
the purpose of OS kernel, as you know, but commodity boxes do not
provide that many such 'smaller units'. That is the problem Azul
(http://www.azulsystems.com) solves by packing in excess of 760 compute
units (and equal number of GB) in one box and have its specialized
software (OS) control allocation of those units on demand and by policy.
The only limitation there is that, it only knows how to execute Java.
You can have one JVM take all the cores in the box (when you have a
highly parallelized application) or several VMs dynamically share those
cores and memory subject to policy constraints. So, in your
terminology, an Azul domain with one or more Azul boxes becomes a
'girddized' cloud with a special purpose. Obviously, this won't serve
well for single threaded applications.

btw, this arrangement also gives the opportunity to have a huge heap for
one VM with practically no GC pause!

rgds,
S.R.

>
> Am I missing something, or is virtualization a tactical answer and
> therefore a short-term solution, and not a great place to start
> building management frameworks (for example) on top of?
>
> -d

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