What does the appliance do and what unique value does it provide to the intended audience:
This is an interesting and appealing concept, I look forward to seeing how well it works in reality.

Innovative use of virtualization technology:
Minor. Distributed virtual clusters are an interesting use of virtualization, however I am unsure if this could actually be called innovative.

Size of the appliance relative to functionality and performance:
At over 1GB this appliance seems very large and I don't believe that it provides enough functionality to justify this size. Could a sub 100MB version be built?

Comments:
In general, appliances should not require the user to access the command line, however my understanding is that the purpose of this appliance is to run command line programs on the virtual super computer thus necessitating use of the command line. Although I am interested in trying out this appliance the size would probably deter me from downloading it. I feel that this concept could be better implemented in a smaller and more user friendly appliance.

Note : This review is based only on the appliance description, not on the actual appliance

Glad to see your interest. The innovative aspects of this appliance are that the distributed virtual cluster is wide-area, ad-hoc, requires zero configuration from the part of the user to form virtual network connections, and connects to VMs behind NATs. As far as we know, this has never been done before.

Yes, at this point users do need to be command-line savvy and understand how to use basic Condor commands to make use of this appliance.

We have created a smaller version of the appliance (380MB), we are checking if it is possible to replace the old image under the appliance challenge rules.

I tried your appliance and I would say you guys have done a great job. I had some jobs but not enough computing power to run them. The only solution in my mind was to buy a cluster but I think using your stuff, i can get it done cheap. Is this the latest version and how can i customize it for my purpose??

thanks for the clarification

Thanks coderman. I hope you are satisfied with the clarification

Thanks Coderman. If you are interested in this, I would be more than happy to work with you so that you can understand the great power this appliance can bring to you. We have a design documet available at www.acis.ufl.edu/~ipop/grid_appliance which can provide you with all the technical insights about how the appliance was designed and what all core technologies it uses.

Thanks for pointing this out. But I am not sure, what is the point you are trying to make. If you are interested in this field, I can point you to several other similar works. The strength of our work is that our approach is self-configuring and self-organizing and combines a lot of things to deliver the final appliance. It uses Peer-to-Peer at its base routing layer which provides scalability, fault-tolerance and decentralization. It tunnels IP over Peer-to-Peer. On top of that it creates a Virtual IP network and uses the power of Condor(the key component of the paper you just pointed out) for distributed scheduling. We package everything in a small VM image and the image is configured and customized that when it boots up, it contacts a public server, gets an IP address on the Virtual Network and becomes a part of the Grid-Appliance network and can submit jobs to all the machines in the network using condor.

Please enlighten me what specifically you want to bring up by pointing out to this paper and I would be more than glad to answer your specific questions or concerns. More details can be found at:

http://boykin.acis.ufl.edu/wiki/index.php/PeerVM
http://boykin.acis.ufl.edu/wiki/index.php/IPOP
http://boykin.acis.ufl.edu/wiki/index.php/WOW

--Abhishek