CSR: Small: High Assurance at Low Cost in Data Centers Using Virtualization

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。随着我们对网上服务的依赖不断增加，保持这些服务的高可用性的需求已成为一项迫切的需求，也是一项挑战。这些挑战包括硬件故障、软件错误、操作错误、恶意入侵以及停电和自然灾害等大范围灾难。该项目正在开发技术，以构建在这种具有挑战性的条件下使用虚拟化保持高可用性的数据中心服务。该项目有两个贡献。首先，是一种新颖的拜占庭容错（BFT）方法，其复制成本因子接近F+1，以容忍最多F次故障，从而将最先进的BFT方法的成本减半。通过使用虚拟化，可以节省复制成本并相应提高服务吞吐量，并且适用于承载多路复用业务的数据中心。其次，是一种在典型条件下以可忽略的服务复制成本从广域灾难中无缝恢复的新方法。这些增益是通过使用虚拟机检查点、异步复制和语义感知存储技术实现的。该项目通过理论分析和原型驱动实验证明了这些方法的可行性。原型实现将提供给其他研究人员和实践者。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).As our reliance on online services continues to grow, the need for maintaining high availability of these services has become a pressing need as well as a challenge. The challenges include hardware failures, software bugs, operator error, malicious break-ins, and wide-area disasters such as power blackouts and natural catastrophes. This project is developing techniques to build data center services that remain highly available under such challenging conditions using virtualization.The project makes two contributions. First, is a novel approach for Byzantine fault-tolerance (BFT) with a replication cost factor close to F+1 in order to tolerate up to F failures, thereby halving the cost of state-of-the-art BFT approaches. The savings in replication cost as well as commensurate gains in service throughput are realized using virtualization and are applicable to data centers hosting multiplexed services. Second, is a novel approach to seamlessly recover from wide-area disasters with negligible service replication cost during typical conditions. These gains are realized using virtual machine checkpointing, asynchronous replication, and semantics-aware storage techniques. The project demonstrates the feasibility of these approaches using theoretical analysis as well as prototype-driven experiments. The prototype implementations will be made available to other researchers and practitioners.