3,183 research outputs found
The Virtual Block Interface: A Flexible Alternative to the Conventional Virtual Memory Framework
Computers continue to diversify with respect to system designs, emerging
memory technologies, and application memory demands. Unfortunately, continually
adapting the conventional virtual memory framework to each possible system
configuration is challenging, and often results in performance loss or requires
non-trivial workarounds. To address these challenges, we propose a new virtual
memory framework, the Virtual Block Interface (VBI). We design VBI based on the
key idea that delegating memory management duties to hardware can reduce the
overheads and software complexity associated with virtual memory. VBI
introduces a set of variable-sized virtual blocks (VBs) to applications. Each
VB is a contiguous region of the globally-visible VBI address space, and an
application can allocate each semantically meaningful unit of information
(e.g., a data structure) in a separate VB. VBI decouples access protection from
memory allocation and address translation. While the OS controls which programs
have access to which VBs, dedicated hardware in the memory controller manages
the physical memory allocation and address translation of the VBs. This
approach enables several architectural optimizations to (1) efficiently and
flexibly cater to different and increasingly diverse system configurations, and
(2) eliminate key inefficiencies of conventional virtual memory. We demonstrate
the benefits of VBI with two important use cases: (1) reducing the overheads of
address translation (for both native execution and virtual machine
environments), as VBI reduces the number of translation requests and associated
memory accesses; and (2) two heterogeneous main memory architectures, where VBI
increases the effectiveness of managing fast memory regions. For both cases,
VBI significanttly improves performance over conventional virtual memory
VXA: A Virtual Architecture for Durable Compressed Archives
Data compression algorithms change frequently, and obsolete decoders do not
always run on new hardware and operating systems, threatening the long-term
usability of content archived using those algorithms. Re-encoding content into
new formats is cumbersome, and highly undesirable when lossy compression is
involved. Processor architectures, in contrast, have remained comparatively
stable over recent decades. VXA, an archival storage system designed around
this observation, archives executable decoders along with the encoded content
it stores. VXA decoders run in a specialized virtual machine that implements an
OS-independent execution environment based on the standard x86 architecture.
The VXA virtual machine strictly limits access to host system services, making
decoders safe to run even if an archive contains malicious code. VXA's adoption
of a "native" processor architecture instead of type-safe language technology
allows reuse of existing "hand-optimized" decoders in C and assembly language,
and permits decoders access to performance-enhancing architecture features such
as vector processing instructions. The performance cost of VXA's virtualization
is typically less than 15% compared with the same decoders running natively.
The storage cost of archived decoders, typically 30-130KB each, can be
amortized across many archived files sharing the same compression method.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 2 table
The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions
In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm
shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of
the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of
the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have
investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete
replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task.
Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing
their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move
towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking.
To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive
overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence.
The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first
comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures
according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios,
addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and
evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the
runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally
fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence
architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table
NFV Based Gateways for Virtualized Wireless Sensors Networks: A Case Study
Virtualization enables the sharing of a same wireless sensor network (WSN) by
multiple applications. However, in heterogeneous environments, virtualized
wireless sensor networks (VWSN) raises new challenges such as the need for
on-the-fly, dynamic, elastic and scalable provisioning of gateways. Network
Functions Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging paradigm that can certainly aid
in tackling these new challenges. It leverages standard virtualization
technology to consolidate special-purpose network elements on top of commodity
hardware. This article presents a case study on NFV based gateways for VWSNs.
In the study, a VWSN gateway provider, operates and manages an NFV based
infrastructure. We use two different brands of wireless sensors. The NFV
infrastructure makes possible the dynamic, elastic and scalable deployment of
gateway modules in this heterogeneous VWSN environment. The prototype built
with Openstack as platform is described
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