SLICE: Secure Lightweight Cloud Computing Environment

ABSTRACT:While being backward compatible with Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) Operation Systems (OS) and applications, system-level Virtual Machine (VM) only provides a coarse level for current generic compute cloud computation. As a result, current cloud requires a full-blown machine (system) level virtualization in each VM instance. However, many cloud computing requires finer grained resource allocation and sharing than at the system level. In this proposal, IAI proposes to implement a secure lightweight cloud computing environment (SLICE) to provide a much finer grained isolation and abstraction for cloud computing. First, SLICE will provide the process-level VMs which are much lighter than the traditional system-level VMs. Second, SLICE will enforce the security of VM by providing isolated execution. Third, SLICE will provide much finer grained resource allocation and sharing among distributed cloud nodes. In addition, SLICE enables the in-memory Map/Reduce processing and the native execution of cloud computing applications. In Phase I, IAI developed a preliminary SLICE prototype and evaluate representative cloud computing applications in SLICE. The evaluation results showed that a SLICE-based cloud can result in significant savings compared to current established cloud computing framework.BENEFIT:The potential commercial customers are sensitive data owners who want to adapt to the cloud technology but are frustrated by the flexibility, performance, security and privacy considerations. IAIs proposed technology can also be applied to other cloud-based distributed resource managements. In addition to our proposed technology, IAI has completed or is currently developing a range of related cloud-based tools. Integration of our proposed technology with IAIs current cloud-based tools broadens our product base and application to potential markets. End users of SLICE include cloud provider (e.g. Amazon), commercial organizations (e.g. Citibank, United Healcare) that use distributed applications to analyze their big data or to process streams. IAI has contacts within each of these organizations and will actively engage them during the program to generate interest in SLICE.