CSR: Medium: Collaborative Research: Towards Finer-grained Cloud Computing

CSR：媒介：协作研究：迈向更细粒度的云计算

• 批准号: 1409191
• 负责人: Alan Mislove
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: Northeastern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-01 至 2019-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1409191&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CSR; Medium; Collaborative; Research; Towards

Over the past few years, cloud computing services like Amazon's EC2 have commoditized computing resources. Despite this success, cloud computing primarily targets users whose virtual machines (VMs) are rarely idle, as cloud users are typically billed for the amount of time the VM is awake, not how much work it does. Thus, services that are long-lived but mostly idle a significant fraction of the time are prohibitively expensive for many potential users of cloud computing. In this project, the PIs are developing a finer-grained model of cloud computation based around lightweight instances. Lightweight instances are more akin to processes than virtual machines; they allow clients to only pay for their actual usage of cloud resources, and to not have the complexity and overhead of running an entire operating system. The lightweight instance approach has the potential to bring the benefits of cloud computing to a variety of users for whom it is a poor fit today. The PIs are exploring a new, finer-granularity model for cloud computing, wherein the cloud makes it appear that all client instances are running all the time, but may actually swap them out while idle to permit statistical multiplexing. Compared to today's VM-based model and container-based model, the proposed process-based model provides a much higher level of abstraction, and lets clients run long-lived, mostly-idle services much more cheaply than is possible today. If successful, the research would open up a wide variety of new applications and architectures: processes could cheaply be run in the cloud on behalf of end users, providing them with the ability to run long-lived services cheaply.

在过去的几年里，亚马逊的EC2等云计算服务已经将计算资源商品化。尽管取得了这样的成功，云计算主要针对的是那些虚拟机(VM)很少空闲的用户，因为云用户通常是根据VM唤醒的时间量而不是它做了多少工作来计费的。因此，对于许多云计算的潜在用户来说，寿命长但大部分时间空闲的服务成本高得令人望而却步。在这个项目中，PI正在开发一个基于轻量级实例的更细粒度的云计算模型。轻量级实例更类似于进程，而不是虚拟机；它们允许客户端只为其云资源的实际使用付费，而不需要运行整个操作系统的复杂性和开销。轻量级实例方法有可能将云计算的好处带给今天不太适合云计算的各种用户。PI正在探索一种新的、更细粒度的云计算模型，其中云使所有客户端实例看起来一直在运行，但实际上可能会在空闲时将它们换出，以允许统计多路传输。与今天的基于VM的模型和基于容器的模型相比，提出的基于流程的模型提供了更高级别的抽象，并允许客户端以比现在更低的成本运行长期的、大部分空闲的服务。如果成功，这项研究将开辟各种新的应用和架构：流程可以代表最终用户在云中廉价运行，为他们提供以低成本运行长期服务的能力。