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

在现代计算机系统中，由新兴的多核芯片多处理器(CMPS)提供的计算资源与诸如Java VM或Microsoft Common Language Runtime之类的虚拟机(VM)利用这些资源的能力之间存在不匹配。CMP体系结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，软件将面向VM而不是本机处理器。然而，由于现代虚拟机不能直接利用CMP提供的粗粒度并行性，因此它们在未来几代处理器上的性能不会有显著的提高。该工作旨在通过创建流水线VM来加速在CMPS上的VM执行，这些流水线VM被实现为一系列平衡的程序或流水线阶段，每个阶段在不同的处理器核心上执行。与非流水线VM相比，具有N个平衡级的流水线VM可以提供N倍的性能提升。流水线VM允许程序员在编写顺序单线程程序时受益于多核并行。本研究议程紧密地结合了关于VM流水线的优点和局限性的理论工作，包括1)在真实系统上的流水线的设计和实现，以及2)新的计算机体系结构和机制的探索。具体而言，研究计划将重点放在以高速网络为目标的流水线VM上，在这个领域，激进的CMP已经部署在商业和学术平台中，公共可访问的试验台将允许其他人开发和部署他们自己设计的流水线VM。

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.