Scientists get a million Linux kernels to run at once

tgdaily.com ^ | Monday, August 03, 2009 06:22 | By the writing staff

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Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, have run more than a million Linux kernels as virtual machines.

The technique will allow them to effectively observe behaviour found in malicious botnets, or networks of infected machines that can operate on the scale of a million nodes.

One of the researchers Ron Minnich, said they are often difficult to analyze since they are geographically spread all over the world.

However using virtual machine and a Thunderbird supercomputing cluster for the demonstration, the team was able to run VMS at a similar scale as a botnet.

This  allows cyber researchers to watch how botnets work and explore ways to stop them in their tracks said Minnich.

The largest number of kernals that had been run at once was 20,000 kernels.  However the more kernels that can be run at once the more effective cyber security professionals can be in combating the global botnet problem.

The hope is one day to emulate the computer network of a small nation, or even one as large as the United States, in order to ‘virtualise’ and monitor a cyber attack.”

“The sheer size of the Internet makes it very difficult to understand in even a limited way,” said Minnich.
It has been estimated that the team will need to run 100 million CPUs by 2018 in order to build a computer that will run at the speeds they need.

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fyi

[ShadowAce]

[wastedyears]

[rahbert]

Glad to see that VMS is still relevant!

[SeeSharp]

The title says: Scientists get a million Linux kernels to run at once

The text says: ...the team was able to run VMS at a similar scale as a botnet.

So was it Linux or was it VMS? If it was VMS I'm guessing they didn't buy a million licenses.

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Based on what I saw in the comments that could be VM’s...( as in Virtual Machines )...which would seem more likely...but I don’t know what the writer meant.

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Yah,...their writng staff needs to sharpen up,....

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Searched on a name mentioned...Ron Minnich...and found this:

Content Tagged with Eric-Van-Hensbergen + Ron-Minnich

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v9fs provides a Plan9 9P2000 resource sharing protocol client for the Linux 2.6 kernel. The source code has been maintained as part of the main-line kernel since 2.6.14 with bugtracking through bugzilla org. Normal plan9 servers will work with v9fs, but for folks looking for a Linux-based server we have moved towards support the npfs libraries and applications.

v9fs was originally developed by Ron Minnich(rminnich%lanl.gov) and Maya Gokhale(maya%lanl.gov). Additional development by Greg Watson(gwatson%lanl.gov) and most recently Eric Van Hensbergen(ericvh%gmail.com).

The 2.6 port of V9FS and performance analysis was supported in part by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency under Contract No. NBCH30390004. The original V9FS research work by Ron Minnich was supported by DARPA Contract #F30602-96-C-0297.

Documentation can be found in the Linux kernel source under Documentation/filesystems/9p.txt with a snapshot captured here

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Not sure what NPFS is about ....but Ron has been around for a while....

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MORE.................

Ron Minnich, Sandia National Laboratories

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Ron Minnich is the inventor of LinuxBIOS and one of the co-leaders of the project, now called coreboot. While coreboot initially found use in supercomputing, having been used in several tens of thousands of cluster nodes around the world, it now finds its most common use in embedded systems such as routers, consumer electronics, and systems requiring a secure BIOS supply chain. Ron is currently a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, working in supercomputing with Linux and Plan 9.

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See updates,...I think the writers screwed that up...It seems to me it is Virtual Machines,....or VMs for short...see history on Ron Minnich

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Plan9...followup to UNIX....

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[antiRepublicrat]

They’re running them in virtual machines.

The most I’ve heard of on a single machine was 1,500 Linux VMs on an IBM mainframe, although this is across thousands of machines.

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Chasing ...

coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware)

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Following on creboot....

Payloads

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Following on coreboot...typo correction.

[COBOL2Java]

IPV6 anyone?

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Hmmm...found this:

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Finishing up my chasing on coreboot...

Payloads

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History

The payload was originally intended to be a Linux kernel stored in flash. Flash ROM growth rate was anticipated optimistically however, today there are not many mainboards that actually have enough flash ROM room for a kernel. 512KB can be seen here-and-there and a few boards come with 1MB. Recent kernels really want that MB, and then you'll only have room for 300-400 KB of initial ramdisk, which could be too small too, depending on the application. During testing, a payload may also be downloaded via X-Modem from the serial debug console, saving flashing time.

So, other payloads are used; the two major ones are FILO (soon to be deprecated in favor of GRUB2) and Etherboot (soon to be deprecated in favor of GPXE). FILO loads a kernel from a filesystem on an IDE device and Etherboot loads a kernel from the network or from a filesystem on an IDE device.

If you're using FILO there is no Linux kernel until FILO loads it, and the kernel loaded by FILO (or Etherboot) can absolutely be the one you want to run in your system. Just set it up with the correct root and init commandline so that it can start init.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Followup on Plan9....Wikipedia:

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

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Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, primarily used for research. It was developed as the research successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002. Plan 9 is most notable for representing all system interfaces, including those required for networking and the user-interface, through the filesystem rather than specialized interfaces. Plan 9 aims to provide users with a workstation-independent working environment through the use of the 9P protocols. Plan 9 continues to be used and developed in some circles as a research operating system and by hobbyists.

The name "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" is a reference to the 1959 cult science fiction B-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space.