Reconstructable Software Appliances with Kameleon

Abstract

International audienceA software appliance builder bundles together an application with its needed middleware and an operating system to allow easy deployment on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers. These builders have the potential to address a key need in our community: the ability to reproduce an experiment. This paper reports the experiences on developing a software appliance builder called Kameleon that leverages popular and well tested tools. Kameleon simplifies the creation of complex software appliances that are targeted at research on operating systems, HPC and distributed computing. It does so by proposing a highly modular description format that encourages collaboration and reuse of procedures. Moreover, it provides debugging mechanisms for improving experimenter's productivity. To justify that our appliance builder stands above others, we compare it with the most known tools used by developers and researchers to automate the construction of software environments for virtual machines and IaaS infrastructures

Performance Evaluation of Containers for HPC

“…Regarding the software stack, we used: Debian Jessie, Linux kernel versions: 3.2, 3.16 and 4.0, TAU version 2.23.1, OpenMPI version 1.6.5 and NPB version 3.3. We wrote recipes 1 to install the necessary software using Kameleon [11], which automates and ensures the installation of the same software stack on the containers and on the real machines. We instrumented the benchmarks: LU, EP, CG, MG, FT, IS from NPB benchmark suite [1] using TAU [13] in order to carry out the evaluation.…”

Batsim: A Realistic Language-Independent Resources and Jobs Management Systems Simulator

“…Such an environment typically regroups an Operating System and a set of programs and libraries, specifying which version is used for each component. To build our environments we used Kameleon [30]. This tool allows its users to build environments from template recipes and to extend them.…”

Testbeds Support for Reproducible Research

“…The approaches for generating the testbed-provided system images differ: while Chameleon and CloudLab don't provide information about the process, Grid'5000 uses Kameleon [12]. This tool supports creating images using a set of recipes similar to configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible, and also uses a cache to ensure that environments generated at different times, but from the same recipes, will not differ if data downloaded from the Internet (e.g.…”