University of Toronto Announces Snowflock
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Andres Lagar-Cavilla wrote in to announce the news that he and his team have just released Snowflock.
Snowflock lets you clone Xen VMs into dozens of identical replicas running in different hosts. Snowflock can do this in less than a second and with very low runtime overhead. With Snowflock you can, for example, perform parallel computations on the fly by scaling ”instantaneously” your computing footprint in a shared cluster. Snowflock is a research prototype, hence the 0.1 major-minor. A minimum degree of experience with Xen and Linux is necessary to use the system.
Snowflock is the joined work of researchers at both the the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto and at Carnegie Mellon University. Snowflock has been released in a binary and source release, under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The release is available at http://compbio.cs.toronto.edu/snowflock
Snowflock was presented earlier this year at the Xen Summit North America 2008. A more complete description of the implementation and functionality of Snowflock is available in this technical report.
