Kittyhawk: Enabling cooperation and competition in a global, shared computational system

Abstract

Kittyhawk represents our vision for a Web-scale computational resource that can accommodate a significant fraction of the world's computation needs and enable various parties to compete and cooperate in the provisioning of services on a consolidated platform. In this paper, we explain both the vision and the system architecture that supports it. We demonstrate these ideas by way of a prototype implementation that uses the IBM Blue Genet/P platform. In the Kittyhawk prototype, we define a set of basic services that enable the allocation and interconnection of computing resources. By using examples, we show how higher layers of services can be built by using our basic services and standard open-source software. © 2009 IBM.