Prof. Dr. Frank Bellosa, Marc Rittinghaus

Abstract:

While full-system simulation enables detailed analysis of workloads it is much slower than hardware-assisted virtualization, with slowdown factors ranging from 30 to 1000. The SimuBoost concept aims to combine the benefits of full-system simulation and virtualization. Checkpoints of a virtual machine’s state are created in regular intervals and used to seed parallelized distributed simulations. To reach an optimal degree of parallelization, checkpoints have to be created in short intervals with low downtimes.

In this thesis we evaluate the viability of the SimuBoost concept. We improve an existing checkpointing prototype to minimize the downtime by replacing the underlying storage mechanism and performing asynchronous deduplication. We also implement a cluster-distribution solution in order to measure the actual speedup achievable by SimuBoost.

The evaluation shows that the new storage mechanism and performing deduplication asynchronously greatly reduce the downtime caused by checkpointing.

BibTex:

@mastersthesis{eicher15vmckpsimuboost,
 author = {Bastian Eicher},
 title = {Virtual Machine Checkpoint Storage and Distribution for SimuBoost},
 type = {Master Thesis},
 year = 2015,
 month = sep # "04",
 school = {Operating Systems Group, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany}
}