CSR: Medium: Multicore Virtual Machines for High-Speed Networking

在现代计算机系统中，在由新兴的多核芯片多处理器（CMP）提供的计算资源与虚拟机（VM）（诸如Java VM或微软公共语言处理器）利用这些资源的能力之间存在不匹配。CMP架构将主导下几代处理器;同时，出于安全性和可移植性的原因，软件将针对虚拟机而不是本机处理器。然而，由于现代虚拟机是装备不良，直接利用粗粒度的并行提供的CMP，他们将不会经历显着的性能提高与未来几代processors.This工作的目的是开拓一种方法，用于加速VM上CMP的执行，通过创建流水线虚拟机实现为一系列的平衡程序，或流水线阶段，每个执行一个不同的处理器核心。相对于非流水线VM，具有N个平衡级的流水线VM可以提供N倍的性能增加。流水线虚拟机允许程序员在编写顺序单线程程序时受益于多核并行性。本研究议程将虚拟机流水线的优点和限制的理论工作与以下两个方面紧密结合：1）在真实的系统上设计和实现流水线，2）探索新的计算机体系结构和机制。具体来说，研究计划侧重于针对高速网络的流水线虚拟机，在这个领域，积极的CMP已经部署在商业和学术平台中，并且公共可访问的测试平台将允许其他人开发和部署自己设计的流水线虚拟机。

A mismatch exists in modern computer systems between the computational resources provided by emerging multicore chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) and the ability of virtual machines (VMs), such as the Java VM or Microsoft Common Language Runtime, to exploit those resources. CMP architectures will dominate the next several processor generations; meanwhile, for reasons of security and portability, software will target VMs rather than native processors. However, since modern VMs are ill-equipped to directly exploit the coarse-grained parallelism provided by CMPs, they will not experience significant performance increases with future generations of processors.This work aims to pioneer an approach for accelerating the execution of VMs on CMPs by creating pipelined VMs which are implemented as a series of balanced programs, or pipeline stages, each executing on a distinct processor core. A pipelined VM with N balanced stages can provide an N-fold increase in performance relative to an unpipelined VM. Pipelined VMs allow programmers to benefit from multicore parallelism while writing sequential single-threaded programs.This research agenda closely integrates theoretical work on the benefits and limits of VM pipelining, with both 1) the design and implementation of pipelines on real systems, and 2) the exploration of novel computer architectures and mechanisms. For concreteness, the research plan focuses on pipelined VMs that target high-speed networking, an area in which aggressive CMPs are already deployed in commercial and academic platforms and where publically-accessible testbeds will allow others to develop and deploy pipelined VMs of their own design.