The overall objective of the XtreemOS project is the design, implementation, evaluation and distribution of an open source Grid operating system (named XtreemOS) with a native support for virtual organizations (VO).
The approach we propose to investigate in this project is the construction of a Grid OS made up of a set of system services based on traditional general purpose OS Linux, extended as needed to support VO and to provide appropriate interfaces to the Grid OS services.
Installed on each participating machine, the XtreemOS system should provide the Grid with what an operating system offers to a single computer: abstraction from the hardware and resource sharing between different users. It would thus considerably ease the work of users belonging to VOs by giving them (as far as possible) the illusion of using a traditional computer, and releasing them from dealing with the complex resource management issues of a Grid environment.
The XtreemOS consortium composition is balanced between academic and industrial partners interested in designing and implementing the XtreemOS components (Linux extensions to support VOs and Grid OS services), packaging and distributing the XtreemOS system on different hardware platforms, promoting and providing user support for the XtreemOS system, and experimenting with Grid applications using the XtreemOS system. Different end-users are involved in XtreemOS project providing various test cases in scientific and business computing domains.