CAREER: VIVA - Vertically Integrated VirtualizAtion: Automatic, Full System, Specialization for High-End Computing

虚拟化已经成为一种关键的系统设计技术，用于通过抽象分层来降低现代硬件、软件系统和应用程序的复杂性，抽象分层简化了应用程序对资源和系统服务的推理和利用。然而，虚拟化的好处（例如通用性、可移植性、可扩展性和简化应用程序调试、部署和开发）是以性能为代价的，因为层的数量、深度和复杂性都在增加。深度分层引入了额外的间接级别、额外的冗余计算和越来越低效的跨层通信。为了减少虚拟化的开销，许多高端系统和服务的开发人员试图通过移除或穿透层接口来使层专门化以满足应用程序的需求。然后，应用程序和系统代码混合在一起并一起优化，从而以牺牲通用性、可移植性和可扩展性为代价来提高性能。目前，这种专门化几乎完全由手工以特设方式进行。 该项目将开发新的方法和途径，通过虚拟化层的垂直集成（VIVA）在程序控制下自动化和推进专业化流程。所提出的方法的关键是利用越来越流行的趋势，隔离整个应用程序，中间件和操作系统（OS）堆栈使用虚拟机监视器（VMM），使每个执行实例可以采用分层的软件，它唯一需要。 VIVA利用这种系统提供的隔离，根据执行应用程序的要求积极地定制和优化系统的所有层，消除程序未使用的所有服务，例如，用于资源共享和安全的OS服务。此外，由于程序行为随时间而变化，并且越来越多地由数据驱动，因此要开发的技术将是动态的和自适应的。

Virtualization has emerged as a key system design technology for reducing the complexity of modern hardware, software systems, and applications, through abstract layering that simplifies reasoning about, and making use of, resources and system services by applications. The benefits of virtualization (e.g. generality, portability, extensibility, and simplifying application debugging, deployment, and development) however, come at a cost in performance since the number, depth, and complexity of layers is increasing. Deep layering introduces additional levels of indirection, additional redundant computation, and increasingly inefficient cross-layer communication. To reduce the overhead of virtualization many developers of high-end systems and services attempt to specialize the layers to the needs of the application by removing or penetrating the layer interfaces. The application and system code are then co-mingled and optimized together, thereby improving performance at the expense of generality, portability, and extensibility. This specialization, at present, is performed almost exclusively by hand in an ad-hoc fashion. The project will develop new methods and approaches to automate and advance the specialization process under programmatic control through Vertical Integration of Virtualization layers (VIVA). The key to the proposed approach is to exploit the increasingly popular trend of isolating entire application, middleware, and operating system (OS) stacks using virtual machine monitors (VMMs) so that each execution instance can employ the layered software it uniquely requires. VIVA takes advantage of the isolation that such systems provide to aggressively customize and optimize all layers of a system according to the requirements of an executing application eliminating all services that are unused by the program, e.g., OS services for resource sharing and security. Moreover, since program behavior changes over time and is increasingly data driven, the techniques to be developed will be both dynamic and adaptive.