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

["Andrés Lagar Cavilla" <andreslc@cs.toronto.edu>]

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@cs.toronto.edu> 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.
>
>