CAREER: Rethinking Abstractions in Virtualized Architectures and Systems

云计算的最新进展已经导致在现代计算机系统中广泛采用虚拟化技术，其允许更好地利用计算机资源。还有一个稳定的趋势是构建未来的数据中心和具有软件定义架构的高性能计算机。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通常是相互矛盾的目标，这使得虚拟化的大部分经济利益未被利用。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。本研究旨在解决这些问题，并寻求提高虚拟化系统的性能，成本效益和可预测性。该研究将紧密结合到教学中，并通过指导和招募少数民族学生以及在K12学校开展外联活动来进一步扩大其影响。具体而言，该项目将确定导致性能下降，效率低下和不可预测性的现有抽象中的差距，以及查明当前抽象的本质，这些抽象实现了隔离，模块化和可移植性。该项目需要三个研究方向：首先，它将为各种类型的虚拟化系统（包括虚拟机、容器和虚拟化网络）设计和实现增强抽象，以弥合语义差距。其次，它将利用增强的抽象来设计高效、有效和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中抽象的理解，并将这些知识应用于研究传统系统的低效率，并指导新兴架构中新抽象的设计。该奖项反映了NSF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.