One of the virtualization trends I do see in HPC/clustering is in the area of packaging up entire scientific applications into their own custom VMs which contain all the necessary libraries, software dependencies etc.
There is a performance hit now and implementation is clunky but I can see cases where "each app sits in its own VM" and the VMs get launched across a cluster would helpful.
This sort of work is trending upwards with Amazon AWS and other infrastructure providers - it can be easier to blast your workflow out into 'the cloud' if it's all wrapped up in a self contained and super portable VM.
Given how many different versions of R and other core tools like Perl etc. that I need to support on heterogenous scientific clusters this could be a good trend, heh.
Just my $.02 -Chris _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
