[Xen-devel] Re: [Xen-users] Announcing the first release of SnowFlock

[AndrÃs Lagar Cavilla <andreslc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The more technical details of memory on demand etc can be found in our 
technical report: 
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/pub/reports/csrg/578/csrg-578-snowflock-LagarCavilla2008.pdf
Thanks for your interest!
Andres
Javier Guerra wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 3:09 PM, Andres Lagar-Cavilla
> <andreslc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>   
> > More technically:
> > Snowflock is our prototype implementation of the / Impromptu Cluster (IC)/
> > abstraction. In an IC, an application encapsulated inside a virtual machine
> > (VM) is swiftly forked into multiple copies that execute on different
> > physical hosts, and then disappear when the computation ends. ICs simplify
> > the development of parallel applications and reduces management burden by
> > enabling the instantiation of new stateful computing elements: workers that
> > need no setup time because they have a memory of the application state
> > achieved up to the point of forking. This approach combines the benefits of
> > cluster-based parallelism with those of running inside a VM.
> >
> > Snowflock provides swift parallel VM cloning that makes it possible for
> > Internet applications to deliver near-interactive performance for
> > resource-intensive highly-parallelizable tasks. Snowflock makes use of four
> > key techniques: /VM descriptors/ (condensed VM images that allow for
> > sub-second suspension of a running VM and resumption of a of replicas); a
> > /memory-on-demand/ subsystem that lazily populates the VM's memory image
> > during runtime; a set of / avoidance heuristics/ that minimize the amount of
> > VM memory state to be fetched on demand; and a /multicast distribution/
> > system for commodity Ethernet networking hardware that makes the overhead of
> > instantiating multiple VMs similar to that of instantiating a single one.
> >     
> just reading the docs.... i find it nice how you can drive the
> duplication of VMs from within the VM.  great for grids.
>
> could you elaborate about the memory-on-demand? i couldn't find
> anything about it on the manual, and it seems like a major advantage.
>
>   

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