A case for tracking and exploiting inter-node and intra-node memory content sharing in virtualized large-scale parallel systems

Lei Xia*, Peter A Dinda

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

In virtualized large-scale parallel systems scientific workloads consist of numerous processes running across many virtual nodes. Their memory footprint is massive, and this has consequences for services that enhance performance, reliability, or power. We argue that a service that dynamically tracks the sharing of memory content, both within individual nodes, and across nodes, can simplify and enhance the implementation of such services. For example, leveraging content sharing could significantly reduce the size of a checkpoint of a group of nodes. As another example, it could speed VM migration by allowing the reconstruction of a VM's memory from multiple source VMs. Finally, a service that improves reliability by introducing memory redundancy could leverage existing content sharing to minimize the memory costs of any particular level of redundancy. We argue that both intra- and inter-node memory content sharing is common in parallel applications, supporting this claim by a detailed study of both kinds of sharing, at different scales, different granularities, and different times for a range of applications and application benchmarks. We then describe the high level approach we are taking to design and implement a distributed, VMM-based system that can efficiently and scalably identify and track such sharing with low overhead.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationVTDC '12 - 6th International Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing
Pages11-18
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Event6th International Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing, VTDC '12 - Delft, Netherlands
Duration: Jun 18 2012Jun 18 2012

Publication series

NameVTDC '12 - 6th International Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing

Other

Other6th International Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing, VTDC '12
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityDelft
Period6/18/126/18/12

Keywords

  • Content Sharing
  • Virtualization

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications

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