[OT] Trusted Computing and GnuPG
This is a slight off the subject note.
But I spent almost a year trying to get a clusterized
virtual machine project off the ground that would also
involve hardware that would "virtualize" the I/O's of
the PC platform. Part of this project would have
involved using hardware based encryption. In fact we
wanted to encrypt in both the hardware (on the hard
drive) as well as in memory where everything would
remain encrypted until the data needed to be accessed
by the virtual machine associated with the encrypted
data.
It became apparent that "cache thrashing" would
consume all the badwidth of the cluster reducing it to
just an expesive PC since none of the modern operating
systems such a Windows and the applications there in
are created to be threaded for a cluster. No general
case solution to the cache thrashing problem exists.
Xenoserver and Xen and a couple of other projects try
and get around the problem by letting a virtual
machine be moved from one node in the cluster to the
least used node in the cluster similar to the
Vmware-VMotion approach, but again none of them get
around this problem and utilize the aggrigated
bandwidth. We also explored the possiblilty of using
predictive technology to get around the problem.
We also found that encryption and decryption is best
handled in hardware since it can be designed to be
1000 times faster.
Other aspects include the use of optical fiber
connections or infiniband to increase internode
performance. Unfortunately even this type of
interconnects would suffer the same performance
problems due each node waiting for another to access
data.
The encryption part again is possible and would work
well but better done in hardware.I would be surprised
if governments didnt already use it.
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