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Advances in system hardware and system software are steadily redefining the
traditional concept of a computer system.
Until recently, computer systems consisted of a tight coupling of processor, memory, persistent storage and network interface in a physical package the usage of which was managed by a single operating system.
That has all changed. The system instance provided to
applications will increasingly be synthesized dynamically from pools of
disaggregated processor, memory, storage and network interfaces.
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System
hardware and software – technologies such as coherent switched fabrics,
high-bandwidth and low-latency interconnect, fine-grain resource partitioning,
virtual machines, I/O virtualization and live-system migration – will enable system views to be
assembled dynamically by aggregating, dividing, and customizing component parts
as appropriate.
This new system architecture offers greater flexibility by freeing the
application, user, and administrator from many constraints of traditional
systems. This flexibility is the means to achieve many important end goals
including rapid instantiation and shut-down of system instances, resilience to
failures and attacks, fast recovery, energy efficiency, adapting to changing
business needs and operational efficiencies through automation.
The viability of this system architecture and the successful realization of the goals depends on solving a number of challenges to support efficiency, isolation, scalability, manageability and reduced complexity.
Our goal is to build systems from a federated array of resource modules and make them practical and usable for a broad range of applications, users and deployment environments. To achieve this goal, we are researching the right architectural balance between system hardware and system software functions, developing additional primitives for manipulating the system, and identifying new features to extend commodity building blocks.
Our recent work includes research on two threads: architectural support for lightweight virtualization to broaden the reach of virtualization and new virtualization-based primitives for simplifying IT user and IT operator experience.
With regard to lightweight virtualization, one key challenge we are addressing is improving the efficiency of network device virtualization by exploring ideas for multi-core friendly virtualization mechanisms, efficient para-virtualization of networking and fine-grain but lightweight memory protection.
In the area of virtualization-based primitives, we are exploring methods to safely and accurately test changes to complex live systems, virtual appliance methods for application deployment and methods to confine security intrusions.
- "Evaluating Network Processing Efficiency with Processor Partitioning and
Asynchronous I/O," T. Brecht, G. Janakiraman, B. Lynn, V. Saletore, and Y.
Turner, EuroSys 2006, April 2006.
- "Cruz: Application-Transparent Distributed Checkpoint-Restart on Standard
Operating Systems," G. Janakiraman, J. R. Santos, D. Subhraveti, and Y, Turner,
DSN 2005, June 2005.
- "Diagnosing Performance Overheads in the Xen Virtual Machine Environment,"
A. Menon, J. R. Santos, Y. Turner, G. Janakiraman, and W. Zwaenepoel, VEE
2005, June 2005.
- "Automated System Design for Availability," G. Janakiraman, J. R. Santos,
and Y. Turner, DSN 2004, June 2004.
For more information, please send email to john dot janakiraman at hp dot com.
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