[Colloq] PhD Defense - Kapil Arya - May 5th, 2pm, 366 WVH - Process Virtualization in the Context of Checkpoint-Restart and Virtual Machines
Jessica Biron
bironje at ccs.neu.edu
Mon Apr 28 16:24:16 EDT 2014
Kapil Arya
When: Mon May 5, 2pm
Where: 366 WVH
Title: Process Virtualization in the Context of Checkpoint-Restart and Virtual Machines
Abstract:
Checkpoint-Restart is the ability to save a set of running processes to
a checkpoint image on disk, and to later restart it from the disk. In
addition to its traditional use in fault tolerance, recovering from a
system failure, it has numerous other uses, such as for application
debugging and save/restore of the workspace of an interactive
problem-solving environment. Transparent checkpointing operates without
modifying the underlying application program, but it implicitly relies
on a "Closed World Assumption" --- the world (including file system,
network, etc.) will look the same upon restart as it did at the time of
checkpoint. This is not valid for more complex programs. Until now,
checkpoint-restart packages have adopted ad hoc solutions for each case
where the environment changes upon restart.
This dissertation presents "process virtualization" to decouple
application processes from the external environment. A thin
virtualization layer is introduced between the application and each
external subsystem. It provides the application with a consistent view
of the external world and allows for checkpoint-restart to succeed. The
ever growing number of external subsystems makes it harder to deploy and
maintain virtualization layers in a monolithic checkpoint-restart
system. To this extent, an "adaptive plugin" based approach is used to
implement the virtualization layers that allow the checkpoint-restart
system to grow organically.
The principle of decoupling the external subsystem through process
virtualization is also applied in the context of virtual machines for
providing a solution to the long standing "double-paging" problem.
Double-paging occurs when the guest attempts to page out memory that has
previously been swapped out by the hypervisor and leads to long delays
for the guest as the contents are read back into machine memory only to
be written out again. The performance rapidly drops as a result of
significant lengthening of the time to complete the guest I/O request.
Committee:
Gene Cooperman (advisor), College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University
Pete Manolios, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University
Alan Mislove, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University
Wil Robertson, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University
Alex Garthwaite, Twitter, Inc.
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