High performance high availability distributed system performance analysis

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The society increasingly relies on sophisticated computer systems for numerous applications from search engines (e.g. google.com, yahoo.com) to geographical information systems (e.g. maps.google.com), eCommerce systems and handheld music and video players. Such systems have stringent performance requirements either because of the volume of data, the number of simultaneous users or real-time  constraints. Yet, achieving the desired level of performance assumes  proper interaction between several software programs, the operating system and often several networked computers.The objective of the proposed research program is to develop tools and techniques for highly accurate and low disturbance system level performance analysis of uniprocessor, multiprocessor and distributed systems. This is particularly challenging with newer computer systems using multiple processors, with dynamically changing clock frequency, multi-threaded preemptive operating systems (e.g. Linux with preemption) and multiple virtual machines running over an hypervisor (e.g. Xen).The proposed system uses source code instrumentation at the operating system and user level in order to gather a detailed and precise trace of significant events. The instrumentation needs to have a minimal impact on both overall performance and on events ordering (scheduling). Special purpose analysis and viewing modules will be developed to study the performance of different subsystems (memory, disk I/O, networking...). Collaboration is already under way with industrial partners faced with very demanding applications. These industrial partners will provide both real life sample applications needing sophisticated performance analysis tools, and feedback on the efficiency, accuracy and applicability of the proposed algorithms, techiques and tools.