Benchmarking communication middleware for cloud computing virtualizers

REACTION 2013. 2nd International Workshop on Real-time and distributed computing in emerging applications. December 3rd, 2013, Vancouver, Canada.Virtualization technologies typically introduce additional overhead that is specially challenging for specific domains such as real-time systems. One of the sources of overhead are the additional software layers that provide parallel execution environments which reduce the effective performance given by the infrastructure. This work identifies the factors to be analysed by a benchmark for performance evaluation of a virtualized middleware. It provides the set of benchmark tests that evaluate empirically the overhead and stability on a trendy communication middleware, DDS (Data Distribution System for Real-Time), which enables message transmissions via publisher-subscriber (P/S) interactions. Two different implementations, RTI and OpenSplice, have been analysed over a general purpose virtual machine monitor to evaluate their behavior on a client-server application. Obtained results have provided initial execution clues on the performance that a virtualized communication middleware like DDS can exhibit

Challenges in real-time virtualization and predictable cloud computing

Cloud computing and virtualization technology have revolutionized general-purpose computing applications in the past decade. The cloud paradigm offers advantages through reduction of operation costs, server consolidation, flexible system configuration and elastic resource provisioning. However, despite the success of cloud computing for general-purpose computing, existing cloud computing and virtualization technology face tremendous challenges in supporting emerging soft real-time applications such as online video streaming, cloud-based gaming, and telecommunication management. These applications demand real-time performance in open, shared and virtualized computing environments. This paper identifies the technical challenges in supporting real-time applications in the cloud, surveys recent advancement in real-time virtualization and cloud computing technology, and offers research directions to enable cloud-based real-time applications in the future