Hardware counter driven on-the-fly request signatures

Today's processors provide a rich source of statistical information on application execution through hardware counters. In this paper, we explore the utilization of these statistics as request signatures in server applications for identifying requests and inferring highlevel request properties (e.g., CPU and I/O resource needs). Our key finding is that effective request signatures may be constructed using a small amount of hardware statistics while the request is still in an early stage of its execution. Such on-the-fly request identification and property inference allow guided operating system adaptation at request granularity (e.g., resource-aware request scheduling and on-the-fly request classification). We address the challenges of selecting hardware counter metrics for signature construction and providing necessary operating system support for per-request statistics management. Our implementation in the Linux 2.6.10 kernel suggests that our approach requires low overhead sui...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Kai Shen, Ming Zhong, Sandhya Dwarkadas, Chuanpeng Li, Christopher Stewart, Xiao Zhang
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2008, On-the-fly Request, On-the-fly Request Classification, Programming Languages, Resource-aware Request Scheduling