Sandia computer scientists successfully boot one million Linux kernels as virtual machines

[Michael Lauzon]

Here's an interesting article:

(Media-Newswire.com) - LIVERMORE, Calif. — Computer scientists at
Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., have for the first
time successfully demonstrated the ability to run more than a million
Linux kernels as virtual machines.

The achievement will allow cyber security researchers to more
effectively observe behavior found in malicious botnets, or networks
of infected machines that can operate on the scale of a million nodes.
Botnets, said Sandia’s Ron Minnich, are often difficult to analyze
since they are geographically spread all over the world.

Sandia scientists used virtual machine ( VM ) technology and the power
of its Thunderbird supercomputing cluster for the demonstration.

Running a high volume of VMs on one supercomputer — at a similar scale
as a botnet — would allow cyber researchers to watch how botnets work
and explore ways to stop them in their tracks. “We can get control at
a level we never had before,” said Minnich.

Previously, Minnich said, researchers had only been able to run up to
20,000 kernels concurrently ( a “kernel” is the central component of
most computer operating systems ). The more kernels that can be run at
once, he said, the more effective cyber security professionals can be
in combating the global botnet problem. “Eventually, we would like to
be able to emulate the computer network of a small nation, or even one
as large as the United States, in order to ‘virtualize’ and monitor a
cyber attack,” he said.

A related use for millions to tens of millions of operating systems,
Sandia’s researchers suggest, is to construct high-fidelity models of
parts of the Internet.

“The sheer size of the Internet makes it very difficult to understand
in even a limited way,” said Minnich. “Many phenomena occurring on the
Internet are poorly understood, because we lack the ability to model
it adequately. By running actual operating system instances to
represent nodes on the Internet, we will be able not just to simulate
the functioning of the Internet at the network level, but to emulate
Internet functionality.”

Full article: http://media-newswire.com/release_1095644.html

-- 
Sincerely,

Michael Lauzon
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