Umbrella Software Environment Specification
Umbrella is a tool for specifying and materializing comprehensive execution environments, from the hardware all the way up to software and data. A user simply invokes Umbrella with the desired task, and Umbrella parses the specification, determines the minimum mechanism necessary to run the task, downloads missing dependencies, and executes the application through the available minimal mechanism, which may be direct execution, a system container (Parrot, Docker, chroot), a local virtual machine (i.e., VMware), or submission to a cloud environment (i.e., Amazon EC2) or grid environment (i.e., HTCondor).
An Umbrella specification includes six sections: hardware, kernel, os , software, data, and environ. By specifying the dependencies of an application clearly and materializing the execution environment during runtime automatically, the application becomes portable and reproducible.
Umbrella involves multiple sandboxing and virtualization techniques, however, the key idea of Umbrella is to construct a sandbox for an application during runtime by mounting all the os, software, and data dependencies into a virtual root filesystem without copying them. The usage of mounting mechanism allows multiple sandboxes share the same dependencies concurrently.
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(Showing papers with tag umbrella. See all papers instead.)
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Haiyan Meng and Douglas Thain, |
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Haiyan Meng, Douglas Thain, Alexander Vyushkov, Matthias Wolf, and Anna Woodard, |
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Douglas Thain, Peter Ivie, and Haiyan Meng, |
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Haiyan Meng and Douglas Thain, |