CAREER: Hardware Error Resilient Virtualization Infrastructure

云数据中心已成为对我们的社会和经济至关重要的重要网络基础设施，但虚拟化基础设施容易面临许多可靠性挑战。在云中，虚拟化基础设施在商用硬件组件之上提供抽象层，并管理客户虚拟机（VM）的执行。然而，商品计算机系统容易受到硬件错误的影响，并且预计在不久的将来会经历高错误率。值得注意的是，虚拟化系统中的硬件错误可能会导致系统崩溃，从而打破VM故障隔离的假设。托管数十万台服务器的大规模数据中心以及追求积极的服务器整合（旨在在每台服务器上托管数百个虚拟机以提高资源利用率）进一步加剧了这种可靠性风险。传统的虚拟机容错解决方案不足以应对这一挑战。本研究提出了一种硬件容错虚拟化基础架构，该架构在无错误执行期间提供高性能虚拟化，同时提供强大的硬件错误保护。这项研究将促进我们对虚拟化环境中硬件错误行为的理解，并开发虚拟化感知技术，提供强大的错误检测，恢复和保护。拟议的硬件容错虚拟化基础设施将提供一个低成本的完整系统解决方案，利用虚拟化系统的特点，并提供资源管理机制，以平衡性能和可靠性。拟议的虚拟化基础设施如果成功，将为云提供商带来巨大的好处，为数百万用户提供可靠的服务。教育也将是该项目的一个组成部分。该项目将为本科生和研究生课程开发教育材料，招募和指导代表性不足的学生，并开展一些独特的推广活动，使K-12，本科生和研究生受益。

Cloud data centers have become an important cyber-infrastructure vital to our society and economy, yet the virtualization infrastructure is prone to many reliability challenges. In a cloud, the virtualization infrastructure presents an abstraction layer on top of commodity hardware components and manages the execution of guest virtual machines (VMs). However, commodity computer systems are susceptible to hardware errors and expected to experience high error rates in the near future. Notably, a hardware error in a virtualized system can potentially result in a system crash, breaking the assumption of VM fault isolation. This reliability risk is further compounded by the massive scale of data centers hosting hundreds of thousands of servers as well as the pursuit of aggressive server consolidation that aims to host hundreds of VMs on each single server for high resource utilization. Traditional VM fault tolerant solutions are inadequate to address this challenge.This research proposes a hardware error resilient virtualization infrastructure that provides high-performance virtualization during error free execution while offering strong protection against hardware errors. This research will advance our understanding of hardware error behaviors in virtualized environments and develop virtualization-aware techniques that provide robust error detection, recovery, and protection. The proposed hardware error resilient virtualization infrastructure will offer a low-cost full system solution by taking advantage of the characteristics of virtualized systems and providing resource management mechanisms for balanced performance and reliability.The proposed virtualization infrastructure, if successful, will bring substantial benefits to cloud providers in delivering reliable services to millions of users. Education will also be an integral part of the project. This project will develop educational materials for the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, recruit and mentor under-represented students, and carry out a number of unique outreach activities that benefit K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students.