Single System Image (SSI) systems allow a collection of discrete
machines to be presented to the user in the guise of a single virtual
machine. Similarly, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) interfaces allow
one or more physical machines to be presented to the user in the guise
of a collection of discrete virtual machines. Creating an SSI instance
from a pool of virtual resources provisioned from an IaaS provider
affords the ability to leverage the “on-demand” nature of IaaS to
quickly and easily adjust the size of the resource pool. With ElasticSSI
we propose to automate this adjustment process through the application
of elastic scaling. The automation of the scaling process will result in
systems that are self-optimizing with respect to resource utilization;
virtual resources are allocated and released based the value of system
load metrics, which in turn are dependent on the resources allocated.
The scaling process is transparent to the end user as the SSI system
maintains the illusion of interacting with a single Linux OS instance.