Hypervisors, popularized by Xen and VMware, are quickly becoming commodity. They are appropriate for many usage scenarios, but there are scenarios that require system virtualization with high degrees of both isolation and efficiency. Examples include HPC clusters, the Grid, hosting centers, and PlanetLab. We present an alternative to hypervisors that is better suited to such scenarios. The approach is a synthesis of prior work on resource containers and security containers applied to general-purpose, time-shared operating systems. Examples of such container-based systems include Solaris 10, Virtuozzo for Linux, and Linux-VServer. As a representative instance of container-based systems, this paper describes the design and implementation of Linux-VServer. In addition, it contrasts the architecture of Linux-VServer with current generations of Xen, and shows how Linux-VServer provides comparable support for isolation and superior system efficiency.

The need to provide remote visualization of large datasets with adequate levels of quality and interactively has become a major impediment to distributed collaboration in Computational Science.Although Image Based Rendering (IBR) techniques based on plenoptic functions have some important advantages over other approaches to this problem, they suffer from an inability to deal with issues of network latency and server load, due to the large size of the IBR databases they generate.Consequently, IBR techniques have been left largely unexplored for this purppose.In this paper we describe strategies for addressing these obstacles using Logistical Networking (LoN), which is a new and highly scalable approach to deploying storage as a shared communication resource.Leveraging LoN technology and infrastructure, we developed a remote visualization system based on concepts of light field rendering, an IBR method using a 4-D plenoptic function.Our system extends existing work on light fields by employing a modified method of parameterization and data organization that supports more efficient prefetching, caching and loss-less compression. Using this approach, we have been able to interactively browse multi-gigabyte, high-resolution light field databases across the wide area network at 30 frames per second.