System Support for Next Generation Cloud Computing

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Cloud computing provides a utility model that emphasizes pay-per-use and elasticity of provisioning. Unfortunately, existing clouds lack necessary system level mechanisms required by a broad set of applications in order to make full use of the potential of the cloud. The proposed research broadens the set of applications and services that can take advantage of cloud computing. Our first research thrust helps users scale up and down their application's footprint to track instantaneous variations in demand. Unfortunately, instantiating new virtual machines (VM) in current clouds is a slow operation (typically taking "minutes"), and the new VMs originate either as fresh boots or replicas of a template VM, unaware of the current application state. Similarly, current clouds lack mechanisms that simplify the process of scaling down when the demand for an application recedes. The proposed research will create new mechanism that provide the necessary scale-up and scale-down agility to enable users to take full advantage of potential of the cloud model. Our seconds research thrust makes possible the efficient execution of data intensive computations that operate on popular data sets. While virtualization provides many benefits (e.g, security, ease of management, and the flexibility of running in a custom environment configured by the programmer), it limits opportunities for data reuse as each VM has to download its own copy of the data. Our research will make possible efficient file sharing across VMs, and will optimize VM placement to maximize locality.