Methods and Systems for Automatic Inference and Adaptation of Virtualized Computing Environments

Northwestern researchers have developed a new technology called Virtuoso that automatically manages resources for high-performance computing using virtual machines (VM's). A key aspect of Virtuoso is its ability to dynamically adapt to changing workloads and resource availability without requiring any changes to applications or operating systems, making it easy to deploy. By driving control mechanisms automatically, this technology dramatically increases the performance of unmodified parallel and distributed applications that run in virtualized environments. For example, it manages VM placement, overlay topology and routing, network and CPU reservations, and interposing transparent services to improve application performance. Furthermore, Virtuoso uses the virtualization layer to locate the major elements of adaptive computing; it monitors application traffic and loads, adapts applications to the network, reserves resources to improve performance, and adds network services to unmodified applications and operating systems transparently. The researchers have already developed a working prototype. Further details on Virtuoso can be found at www.virtuoso.cs.northwestern.edu.