2011 IEEE 19th Annual International Symposium on Modelling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems

Virtualization is a rapidly evolving technology that provides a range of benefits to computing systems, such as improved resource utilization and management, application isolation and portability, and system reliability. Among these features, live migration, resources management (including vCPU scheduling and I/O management) are core functions. Live migration of virtual machine (VM) provides a sig... View full abstract»

Discrete event simulation tools for analyzing performance of computer networks have been available for decades, dating back to the early days of the venerable ns-2, continuing through GTNetS, SSFNet, ROSSNet, and most recently ns-3. At each step along the way various developers and researchers have reported on "large-scale" simulation experiments using these tools. As the available hardware platfo... View full abstract»

Clouds allow enterprises to increase or decrease their resource allocation on demand in response to changes in workload intensity. Virtualization is one of the building blocks for cloud computing and provides the mechanisms to implement the dynamic allocation of resources. These dynamic reconfiguration actions lead to performance impact during the reconfiguration duration. In this paper, we model ... View full abstract»

Cloud computing has a key requirement for resource configuration in a real-time manner. In such virtualized environments, both virtual machines (VMs) and hosted applications need to be configured on-the-fly to adapt to system dynamics. The interplay between the layers of VMs and applications further complicates the problem of cloud configuration. Independent tuning of each aspect may not lead to o... View full abstract»

Live migration of virtual machines is now commonplace but the issue of synchronising storage remains an obstacle to wide-area migration between datacentres. We discuss the range of possible designs for synchronising disk images and argue that we have to be adaptive at the sector level to efficiently transfer disk-state to the destination. We show, using a number of production workloads, that delay... View full abstract»

The hosting of databases on virtual machines (VMs) has great potential to improve the efficiency of resource utilization and the ease of deployment of database systems. This paper considers the problem of on-demand allocation of resources to a VM running a database serving dynamic and complex query workloads while meeting QoS (Quality of Service) requirements. An autonomic resource-management appr... View full abstract»

Although cloud computing has gained sufficient popularity recently, there are still some key impediments to enterprise adoption. Cloud management is one of the top challenges. The ability of on-the-fly partitioning hardware resources into virtual machine(VM) instances facilitates elastic computing environment to users. But the extra layer of resource virtualization poses challenges on effective cl... View full abstract»

Miss rate curves (MRCs) are a fundamental concept in determining the impact of caches on an application's performance. In our research, we use MRCs to provision caches for applications in a consolidated environment. Current techniques for building MRCs at the CPU caches level require changes to the applications and are restricted to a few processor architectures [7], [22]. In this work, we investi... View full abstract»

Virtualization technology has many attractive qualities including improved security, reliability, scalability, and resource sharing/management. As a result, virtualization has been deployed on an array of platforms, from mobile devices to high end enterprise servers. In this paper, we present a novel approach to working at a virtualization interface, performing workload characterization equipped w... View full abstract»

The Web service (WS) paradigm is an emerging approach to building Web applications, in which software designers typically build new WSs by leveraging existing, third-party WSs. Understanding performance characteristics of third party WSs is critical to the overall system performance. Although such performance evaluation can be done through testing of third party WSs, it is quite an expensive proce... View full abstract»

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides a cloud computing service by renting out computational resources to customers (i.e., cloud users). The customers can dynamically provision virtual servers (i.e., computing instances) in EC2, and then the customers are charged by Amazon on a pay-per-use basis. EC2 offers three options to provision virtual servers, i.e., on-demand, reservation, and spot op... View full abstract»

Search engines are essential actors for web browsing. We analyze here the economic competition between search engines earning money from ad word auctions. We develop a two-level game where at the largest time scale search engines decide which allocation rule to implement, between revenue-based and bid-based, and at the lowest time-scale advertisers decide how to split their advertising budget betw... View full abstract»

We present a new approach to software performance analysis that aims to extend conventional profiling with some of the predictive capabilities of a performance model. The idea is to execute programs in virtual time, which allows hypothetical time scaling of the constituent parts of an application to be explored in advance of any speculative redevelopment aimed at improving performance. Virtual tim... View full abstract»

With ever expanding design space and workload space in multicore era, it is a challenge to identify optimal design points quickly, desirable during the early stage of multicore processor design or programming phase. To meet this challenge, this paper proposes a theoretical framework that can capture the general performance properties for a class of multicore processors of interest over a large des... View full abstract»

Trace-driven simulation is a widely practiced simulation method. However, its use has been typically limited to modeling of in-order processors because of accuracy issues. In this work, we propose and explore In-N-Out, a fast approximate simulation method to reproduce the behavior of an out-of-order superscalar processor with a reduced in-order trace. During trace generation, we use a functional c... View full abstract»