Abstract Today\’s Operating Systems don\’t adequately handle the complexities of multicore processors. architectural features confound existing OS techniques for task scheduling, load balancing, and power management. This article shows that the OS can use data obtained from dynamic runtime observation of task behavior to ameliorate performance variability and more effectively exploit multicore processor resources. The authors\’s research prototypes demonstrate the utility of observation-based policy.
Authors Intel Corporation: Rob Knauerhase, Paul Brett, Tong Li, Barbara Hohlt, Scott Hahn...
Abstract Virtualization is an essential technology in modern datacenters. Despite advantages such as security isolation, fault isolation, and environment isolation, current virtualization techniques do not provide effective performance isolation between virtual machines (VMs). Specifically, hidden contention for physical resources impacts performance differently in different workload configurations, causing significant variance in observed system throughput. To this end, characterizing workloads that generate performance interference is important in order to maximize overall utility....
Abstract We present how an enterprise IT organization sees virtualization in the enterprise and how it can be applied. We look at key enterprise services and applications used within Intel^®^\’s IT department and examine the issues associated with virtualizing servers within the context of those services. We demonstrate that virtual machine (VM) isolation does not extend to performance isolation as we show how applications running in separate VMs can significantly interfere with each other....
Abstract This paper explores one company’s use of PlanetLab for a real application. Intel Corporation is a global enterprise with many Internet “DMZs” and thousands of customers around the world who use them. Intel needs to monitor the quality of service received through these Internet connections from many parts of the world. Doing this with available commercial services or by implementing monitoring systems in rented data center space across the globe would be expensive as well as being relatively inflexible....
Abstract Modern computing environments, such as enterprise data centers, Grids, and PlanetLab, introduce distributed services to address scalability, locality, and reliability. Web Services (WS), in particular, improve decoupling, decentralization, and autonomicity within distributed systems. Unfortunately, scale and decentralization introduce additional problems in distributed services management, such as deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle maintenance. In this paper, we propose a new approach to management of large scale distributed services, based on three artifacts: scalable publish-subscribe eventing, scalable WS-based deployment, and model-based management....
Abstract The construction of highly reliable planetary-scale distributed services in the unreliable Internet environment entails significant challenges. Our research focuses on the use of loose binding among service components as a means to deploy distributed services at scale. An event-based publish/subscribe messaging infrastructure is the principal means through which we implement loose binding. A unique property of the messaging infrastructure is that it is built on a collection of off-the-shelf instant messaging servers running on PlanetLab....
Abstract PlanetLab is a globally distributed network of hosts designed to support the deployment and evaluation of planetary scale applications. Support for planetary applications development poses several security challenges to the team maintaining PlanetLab. The planetary nature of Planetlab mandates nodes distributed across the globe, far from the physical control of the team. The application development requirements force every user to have access to the equivalent of root on each machine, and use of firewalls is discouraged....