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PhD Proposal by Qi Zhang

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~~Title: Dynamic Shared Memory Architecture, Systems, and Optimizations for High Performance and Secure Virtualized Clouds

Qi Zhang
School of Computer Science
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Date: Monday, October 10, 2016
Time: 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM EDT
Location: KACB 3402

Committee:
Dr. Ling Liu (Advisor, School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Dr. Calton Pu (School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Dr. Mustaque Ahamad (School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Dr. Douglas M. Blough (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Dr. Jay Lofstead (Sandia National Laboratories)

Abstract:
Dynamic memory consolidation is an important enabler for high performance virtual machine (VM) execution in virtualized Clouds. Efficient just-in-time memory balancing requires three core capabilities: (i) Detecting memory pressure across VMs hosted on a physical machine; (ii) Allocation of memory to respective VMs; (iii) Enabling fast recovery upon making newly allocated memory available at the high pressure VMs. Although balloon driver technology facilitate the second task, it remains difficult to accurately predict the VM memory demands at affordable overhead, especially under unpredictable and changing workloads. Furthermore, no prior study analyzed the effect of slow response of VM execution to the newly available memory due to paging based application recovery. In this dissertation research, we have made four novel contributions to dynamic shared memory architecture, systems and optimizations for improving VM execution performance and security.  First, we design and developed MemPipe, a shared memory inter-VM communication channel for fast inter-VM network I/O. Second, we developed iBalloon, a light-weight and transparent prediction based facility to enable automated or semi-automated ballooning with more customizable, accurate, and efficient memory balancing policies among VMs. Third, we have developed MemFlex, a novel shared memory swapping facility with three unique properties: (1) It can effectively utilize host idle memory by redirecting the VM swapping traffic to the host-guest shared memory swap area. (2) It provides a hybrid memory swapping model, which treats a fast but small shared memory swap partition as the primary swap area whenever it is possible, and smoothly transits to the conventional disk-based VM swapping on demand. (3) Upon ballooned with sufficient VM memory, MemFlex provides a fast swap-in optimization, which enables the VM to proactively swap in the pages from the shared memory using an efficient batch implementation. In addition, our ongoing work contributes to the secure and efficient dynamic memory management from two perspectives: First, we are developing a shared memory approach to VM memory resource allocation in the entire life cycle of VM execution, called MemLego. Second, we are developing secure memory management facilities to guard memory access with high security and privacy guarantee.  In this proposal exam, I will present MemFlex and the two threads of my ongoing research.

 

Status

  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Tatianna Richardson
  • Created:09/27/2016
  • Modified By:Tatianna Richardson
  • Modified:09/27/2016

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