Date

Presenter

Topic

Presenter Bio

June 10

Sahil Suneja (Tuesday, 12:00pm, BA5256!)

Non-intrusive, Out-of-band and Out-of-the-box Systems Monitoring in the Cloud
The dramatic proliferation of virtual machines (VMs) in datacenters and the highly-dynamic and transient nature of VM provisioning has revolutionized datacenter operations. However, the management of these environments is still carried out using re-purposed versions of traditional agents, originally developed for managing physical systems, or most recently via newer virtualization-aware alternatives that require guest cooperation and accessibility. We show that these existing approaches are a poor match for monitoring and managing (virtual) systems in the cloud due to their dependence on guest cooperation and operational health, and their growing lifecycle management overheads in the cloud.

In this work, we first present Near Field Monitoring (NFM), our non-intrusive, out-of-band cloud monitoring and analytics approach that is designed based on cloud operation principles and to address the limitations of existing techniques. NFM decouples system execution from monitoring and analytics functions by pushing monitoring out of the targets systems' scope. By leveraging and extending VM introspection techniques, our framework provides simple, standard interfaces to monitor running systems in the cloud that require no guest cooperation or modification, and have minimal effect on guest execution. By decoupling monitoring and analytics from target system context, NFM provides "always-on'' monitoring, even when the target system is unresponsive. NFM also works "out-of-the-box" for any cloud instance as it eliminates any need for installing and maintaining agents or hooks in the monitored systems. We describe the end-to-end implementation of our framework with two real-system prototypes based on two virtualization platforms. We discuss the new cloud analytics opportunities enabled by our decoupled execution, monitoring and analytics architecture. We present four applications that are built on top of our framework and show their use for across-time and across-system analytics.

Sahil is a third year Ph.D. student working with Prof. Eyal de Lara. His research interests lie broadly in the fields of Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Parallel & High Performance Computing. His Ph.D. research focuses on making systems management and virtualization management techniques more scalable and efficient in virtualization based cloud systems. His secondary interests include Wireless Networking and Mobile Computing.

July 31

Tianzheng Wang (Thursday, 12:00pm, BA5256!)

Scalable Logging through Emerging Non-Volatile Memory
Emerging byte-addressable, non-volatile memory (NVM) is fundamentally changing the design principle of transaction logging. It potentially invalidates the need for flush-before-commit as log records are persistent immediately upon write. Distributed logging - a once prohibitive technique for single node systems in the DRAM era - becomes a promising solution to easing the logging bottleneck because of the non-volatility and high performance of NVM.

In this paper, we advocate NVM and distributed logging on multicore and multi-socket hardware. We identify the challenges brought by distributed logging and discuss solutions. To protect committed work in NVM-based systems, we propose passive group commit, a lightweight, practical approach that leverages existing hardware and group commit. We expect that durable processor cache is the ultimate solution to protecting committed work and building reliable, scalable NVM-based systems in general. We evaluate distributed logging with logging-intensive workloads and show that distributed logging can achieve as much as ~3x speedup over centralized logging in a modern DBMS and that passive group commit only induces minuscule overhead.

Tianzheng is a first year Ph.D. student working with Prof. Ryan Johnson. His research lies broadly in building high performance and reliable systems with new hardware like emerging non-volatile memories. His research interests also include embedded systems, databases and operating systems in general.