CAREER: Coordination Mechanisms for Performance-aware Virtualization in Clusters

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Virtualization technology is rapidly being adopted in modern cluster platforms that support performance-sensitive applications such as web services, real-time financial transactions, data mining, eScience, and E-commerce. State-of-the-art techniques for virtual machine (VM) scheduling, allocation, and migration often treat the VMs in isolation rather than within the context of other VMs and the cluster environment with which they constantly interact. This project investigates cluster-wide coordination mechanisms that exploit inter-VM and VM-cluster interactions to improve both application performance and cluster utilization. The research targets four specific directions: (1) improving timeliness across inter-VM interactions for time-sensitive applications, (2) virtualizing cluster-wide memory resources to support large memory and large dataset applications within VMs, (3) exploiting inter-VM dependencies to guide VM migration decisions, and (4) reducing network fabric contention through coordinated network access across VMs and virtual clusters. Broader impact of the project will be in the development of virtualization technologies that better support performance-sensitive applications in emerging data centers and high-performance computing clusters. Educational impact will be in training technology experts in virtualization, strengthening the experimental computer science curriculum at Binghamton University, and mentoring of undergraduate, minority, and high school students.