CAREER: Rethinking Abstractions in Virtualized Architectures and Systems

云计算的最新进展导致虚拟化技术在现代计算机系统中的广泛采用，从而可以更好地利用计算机资源。用软件定义的架构构建未来的数据中心和高性能计算机也是一个稳定的趋势。然而，在许多关键领域采用虚拟化仍然存在挑战。首先，虚拟化系统和物理系统之间仍然存在很大的性能差距，特别是对于高速设备、科学工作负载和对延迟敏感的应用程序。其次，在当前模型下，性能隔离和资源弹性经常是相互矛盾的目标，这使得虚拟化的许多经济效益没有得到充分利用。第三，虚拟化中额外的系统复杂性破坏了稳定性和可预测性。本研究解决了这些问题，并寻求改进虚拟化系统的性能、成本效益和可预测性。这项研究将与教学紧密结合，并通过指导和招募少数民族学生，以及在K12学校开展外展活动，进一步扩大其影响。具体来说，该项目将识别现有抽象中导致性能下降、效率低下和不可预测性的缺陷，并精确定位当前抽象的本质，使其能够实现隔离、模块化和可移植性。该项目需要三个研究重点：首先，它将为各种类型的虚拟系统（包括虚拟机、容器和虚拟网络）设计和实现增强抽象，以弥合语义差距。其次，它将利用增强抽象来设计高效、有效和有弹性的资源管理方案，同时保留现有抽象的大部分优点。第三，它将增加对多租户系统抽象的理解，并将这些知识应用于研究传统系统的低效率，并指导新兴体系结构中新抽象的设计。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Recent advances in cloud computing have led to a wide adoption of virtualization techniques in modern computer systems which allow better utilization of computer resources. There is also a steady trend towards building future data centers and high-performance computers with a software-defined architecture. However, challenges remain in adopting virtualization in many critical domains. First, there still exists a large performance gap between virtualized and physical systems, especially for high-speed devices, scientific workloads and latency-sensitive applications. Second, performance isolation and resource elasticity are often contradictory goals under the current models, which leaves much of the economic benefit of virtualization unexploited. Third, the additional system complexity in virtualiation undermines stability and predictability. This research addresses these issues and seeks to improve the performance, cost-effectiveness, and predictability of virtualized systems. The research will be tightly integrated into teaching and further broaden its impacts through mentoring and recruiting minority students, and outreach activities in K12 schools.Specifically, this project will identify gaps in the existing abstractions that cause performance degradation, inefficiencies and unpredictability, as well as pinpointing the essence of current abstractions that has enabled isolation, modularity and portability. The project entails three research thrusts: First, it will design and implement augmented abstractions for various types of virtualized systems, including virtual machines, containers and virtualized networks, to bridge the semantic gaps. Second, it will leverage the augmented abstractions to design efficient, effective and elastic resource management schemes while retaining much of the benefit of the existing abstractions. Third, it will increase the understanding of abstraction in multi-tenant systems and apply the knowledge to studying the inefficiencies of conventional systems and guide the design of new abstractions in emerging architectures.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.