Is it real, or is it In-VIGO?

Formerly, says Jose Fortes, professor of computer science at the University of Florida and principal developer of In-VIGO, "applications would never be able to run in a physical machine if they expected a different environment, and users who might have conflicting requirements would not be able to share that machine. Now we have software that makes the physical machine appear as multiple virtual machines."

Getting Science Done The research tools that the nanoHUB will be making available in the near future focus on three areas of nanoscience: nanoelectronics, nanomechanics, and bionanointerface (which examines the ways in which electrons interface to biological systems). > Full Story

Although two users share the same machine, one user--a theoretical researcher, for example--might be running his or her applications on a Unix platform, tailored to that user's specific requirements, while the other--an experimentalist--might be running on Windows XP. However, they would never be aware of each other's activities, because the physical machine would appear, simultaneously and separately, as multiple virtual machines. In-VIGO creates a virtual address space which assigns each virtual machine its own IP address independent of the IP address of the actual physical machine. The virtual addresses are each mapped to the physical address and translation mechanisms are established between the physical and each of the virtual addresses that rout messages to the appropriate users. "It's like renaming the address of your house for just a few friends and then having the postman know how you did the renaming," explains Fortes.

The capability for multiple, separate virtual environments also has important implications for user security. "You can think of the virtual machines as two separate machines located in the same room--it would be impossible for what happens to one machine to affect what happens to the other," says Fortes. Thus, the damage caused by any serious but unintended errors a user makes is limited only that user's virtual machine. Likewise, in an era of devastating viral attacks that can bring down entire large machines or networks, any malicious code inserted by a rogue user is limited only to that user's environment and does not affect other users or applications.

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