Sovereign

From Self-Organizing Systems Group

The goal of Sovereign is to investigate the use of distributed VM approaches in the context of high availability web applications. Together with Innoopract we are exploring the integration of thread migration and distributed heap approaches in the Maxine VM. On one hand threads in web applications can be proactively replicated onto backup nodes. This backup nodes continue operation in case of failure on a master node. On the other hand threads within a load-balancing cluster of VMs can aggregate on fewer machines in times of low load to save power by shutting down unneeded VM instances. Either of these mechanisms is supported at the level of the VM. No interruption of the running web applications is necessary. Sovereign has started in June 2010 and is running until the end of 2011. Funding is provided by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

More information is available on Sovereign's project homepage.