SODA: a Service-On-Demand Architecture
for Application Service Hosting Utility Platforms
Department of Computer Sciences
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
Project Overview
The Grid is realizing the vision of providing computation as utility: computational jobs can be scheduled
on-demand at Grid hosts based on available computational capacity. In this project, we study another emerging
usage of Grid utility: the hosting of application services. Different from a computational job, an
application service such as an e-Laboratory or an on-line business has longer lifetime, and performs multiple
jobs requested by its clients. A service Hosting Utility Platform (HUP) is formed by a set of hosts in the
Grid, and multiple application services will be hosted on the HUP.
SODA is a Service-On-Demand Architecture that enables on-demand creation of application services on a HUP.
With SODA, an application service will be created in the form of a set of virtual service nodes; each node is
a virtual machine which is physically a `slice' of a real host in the HUP. SODA involves both OS and middleware
techniques, and has the following salient capabilities: (1) on-demand service priming: the image of an
application service as well as the OS on which it runs will be created on-demand and bootstrapped automatically;
(2) better service isolation: services sharing the same HUP host are isolated with respect to administration,
faults, intrusion, and resources; (3) integrated service load management: for each service, a service switch will
be created to direct client requests to appropriate virtual service nodes. Moreover, the application service
provider can replace the default request switching policy with a service-specific policy.
