Palacios is a "type I", non-paravirtualized, OS-independent VMM that builds on the virtualization extensions in modern x86 processors, particularly AMD SVM and Intel VT. Palacios can be embedded into existing kernels, including very small kernels. Thus far, Palacios has been embedded into the Kitten lightweight kernel from Sandia National Labs and the University of Maryland's GeekOS teaching kernel. Currently, Palacios can run on emulated PC hardware, commodity PC hardware, and Cray XT3/4 machines such as Sandia's Red Storm.

Palacios is part of the V3VEE Project.

You can access our public git repository to see an up-to-the-minute view of development and to contribute.

Download the latest released version of Palacios (1.2 - January 28, 2010)

Older released versions are available here


Documentation
  • Manual for Palacios 1.2 and later.
  • Instructions for configuring Palacios 1.1 with the Kitten Lightweight Kernel can be found here
  • Developer documentation is available here (1.0 version, also applicable to 1.1 and 1.2)

    • News

  • January 28, 2010
    Palacios 1.2 and Kitten 1.2.0 have been released and can be downloaded from here.
  • January 21, 2010
    Palacios has been used to virtualize Sandia's Red Storm Supercomputer at scales in excess of 4096 nodes. You can read more in our joint press releases: Northwestern, Sandia, New Mexico
    We have also been written up in HPCwire, CACM, ZDNet, and the New York Times
  • January 15, 2010
    Our public git repository is available
  • Week of January 11, 2010
    The 3rd Palacios/Kitten Joint Developers meeting was held in Evanston, IL.
  • May 1, 2009
    Palacios Version 1.1 has been released. Here is the announcement and the list of changes from 1.0.
  • Week of March 24, 2009
    The 2nd Palacios/Kitten Joint Developers meeting was recently held in Albuquerque, NM.
  • December 4, 2008
    Palacios 1.0 has been released. Here is the announcement and the release notes
  • Week of October 20, 2008
    The first Palacios/Kitten Joint Developers meeting was held in Evanston, IL.
  • February 21-22, 2008
    V3VEE Advisory Board Meeting in Albuquerque, NM.

    • Get Involved

    We are continuously looking for people to become engaged in this project. There are numerous ways to do so:
  • We are looking for graduate students at both Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico.
  • We have independent study and paid REU opportunities for undergraduate students at Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico.
  • This is an open source community development project and we encourage involvement by the broader community.

    • Project Resources

  • General Open Discussion Group
  • Open Discussion Group for Developers
  • Invitation-only Discussion Group for Developers
  • Start Page (For research group members)

    • Papers

  • J. Lange, K. Pedretti, T. Hudson, P. Dinda, Z. Cui, L. Xia, P. Bridges, A. Gocke, S. Jaconette, M. Levenhagen, R. Brightwell, Palacios: A New Open Source Virtual Machine Monitor For Scalable High Performance Computing, Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2010), April, 2010. To Appear.
  • J. Lange, K. Pedretti, T. Hudson, P. Dinda, Z. Cui, L. Xia, P. Bridges, S. Jaconette, M. Levenhagen, R. Brightwell, P. Widener, Palacios and Kitten: High Performance Operating Systems For Scalable Virtualized and Native Supercomputing, Technical Report NWU-EECS-09-14, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, July, 2009. pdf
  • L. Xia, J. Lange, P. Dinda, and C. Bae, Investigating Virtual Passthrough I/O on Commodity Devices, Operating Systems Review, pdf
  • J. Lange, P. Dinda, An Introduction to the Palacios Virtual Machine Monitor---Release 1.0, Technical Report NWU-EECS-08-11, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University. pdf
  • L. Xia, J. Lange, and P. Dinda, Towards Virtual Passthrough I/O on Commodity Devices, Proceedings of the First Workshop on I/O Virtualization at OSDI (WIOV), pdf

    • Acknowledgments

    This project is made possible by support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) via grants CNS-0709168, CNS-0707365, and the Department of Energy (DOE) via a subcontract from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) on grant DE-AC05-00OR22725. Jack Lange is partially supported by a Symantec Research Labs Fellowship.