DVM: towards a datacenter-scale virtual machine

As cloud-based computation becomes increasingly important, providing a general computational interface to support datacenterscale programming has become an imperative research agenda. Many cloud systems use existing virtual machine monitor (VMM) technologies, such as Xen, VMware, and Windows Hypervisor, to multiplex a physical host into multiple virtual hosts and isolate computation on the shared cluster platform. However, traditional multiplexing VMMs do not scale beyond one single physical host, and it alone cannot provide the programming interface and clusterwide computation that a datacenter system requires. We design a new instruction set architecture, DISA, to unify myriads of compute nodes to form a big virtual machine called DVM, and present programmers the view of a single computer where thousands of tasks run concurrently in a large, unified, and snapshotted memory space. The DVM provides a simple yet scalable programming model and mitigates the scalability bottleneck of tr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: VEE
• Authors: Zhiqiang Ma, Zhonghua Sheng, Lin Gu, Liufei Wen, Gong Zhang
• Keywords: Execution Engine, Linear Speedup, Shared Memory Systems, VEE 2012, Virtualization