A virtual machine (VM) appliance encapsulates all the software needed to deploy an application (O/S, libraries, tools, scripts) conveniently into a virtual disk that can be instantiated, or “played”, with VM monitors such as VMware’s VMPlayer.
This Grid appliance is intended for users with high throughput computing needs, for example to execute many long-running simulations concurrently in resources across the network. Once the appliance “boots up”, it joins a dynamic, ad-hoc pool of resources and allows its user to easily log in and submit compute-intensive jobs to this pool. To achieve this, it uses the IPOP peer-to-peer routing technique developed at the ACIS laboratory to self-configure resource pools that run University of Wisconsin's Condor middleware.
Give it a try! To run it, you will need two things: VMware virtualization installed (Workstation, Player or Server); download and unzip the Grid appliance image.
from http://www.acis.ufl.edu/~ipop/grid_appliance/
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