Abstract
Existing challenges for current terascale high performance computing (HPC) systems are increasingly hampering the development and deployment efforts of system software and scientific applications for next-generation petascale systems. The expected rapid system upgrade interval toward petascale scientific computing demands an incremental strategy for the development and deployment of legacy and new large-scale scientific applications that avoids excessive porting. Furthermore, system software developers as well as scientific application developers require access to large-scale testbed environments in order to test individual solutions at scale. This paper proposes to address these issues at the system software level through the development of a virtualized system environment (VSE) for scientific computing. The proposed VSE approach enables ''plug-and-play'' supercomputing through desktop-to-cluster-to-petaflop computer system-level virtualization based on recent advances in hypervisor virtualization technologies. This paper describes the VSE system architecture in detail, discusses needed tools for VSE system management and configuration, and presents respective VSE use case scenarios.
