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

在过去的几年里，像亚马逊EC2这样的云计算服务已经使计算资源商品化。尽管取得了这样的成功，但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处于唤醒状态的时间计费的，而不是它完成了多少工作。因此，对于许多云计算的潜在用户来说，寿命较长但大部分时间都处于空闲状态的服务是非常昂贵的。在这个项目中，pi正在开发一个基于轻量级实例的细粒度云计算模型。轻量级实例更类似于进程，而不是虚拟机；它们允许客户仅为云资源的实际使用付费，并且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目前不适合它的各种用户。pi正在探索一种新的、更细粒度的云计算模型，在这种模型中，云使所有客户端实例看起来一直在运行，但实际上可能在空闲时将它们交换出来，以允许统计多路复用。与目前的基于vm的模型和基于容器的模型相比，建议的基于流程的模型提供了更高层次的抽象，并允许客户端以比目前低得多的成本运行长期空闲的服务。如果成功，这项研究将开辟各种各样的新应用程序和体系结构：进程可以便宜地在云中代表最终用户运行，为他们提供廉价运行长期服务的能力。

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.