3,609 research outputs found
Contextual Bandit Modeling for Dynamic Runtime Control in Computer Systems
Modern operating systems and microarchitectures provide a myriad of mechanisms for monitoring and affecting system operation and resource utilization at runtime. Dynamic runtime control of these mechanisms can tailor system operation to the characteristics and behavior of the current workload, resulting in improved performance. However, developing effective models for system control can be challenging. Existing methods often require extensive manual effort, computation time, and domain knowledge to identify relevant low-level performance metrics, relate low-level performance metrics and high-level control decisions to workload performance, and to evaluate the resulting control models.
This dissertation develops a general framework, based on the contextual bandit, for describing and learning effective models for runtime system control. Random profiling is used to characterize the relationship between workload behavior, system configuration, and performance. The framework is evaluated in the context of two applications of progressive complexity; first, the selection of paging modes (Shadow Paging, Hardware-Assisted Page) in the Xen virtual machine memory manager; second, the utilization of hardware memory prefetching for multi-core, multi-tenant workloads with cross-core contention for shared memory resources, such as the last-level cache and memory bandwidth. The resulting models for both applications are competitive in comparison to existing runtime control approaches. For paging mode selection, the resulting model provides equivalent performance to the state of the art while substantially reducing the computation requirements of profiling. For hardware memory prefetcher utilization, the resulting models are the first to provide dynamic control for hardware prefetchers using workload statistics. Finally, a correlation-based feature selection method is evaluated for identifying relevant low-level performance metrics related to hardware memory prefetching
LightBox: Full-stack Protected Stateful Middlebox at Lightning Speed
Running off-site software middleboxes at third-party service providers has
been a popular practice. However, routing large volumes of raw traffic, which
may carry sensitive information, to a remote site for processing raises severe
security concerns. Prior solutions often abstract away important factors
pertinent to real-world deployment. In particular, they overlook the
significance of metadata protection and stateful processing. Unprotected
traffic metadata like low-level headers, size and count, can be exploited to
learn supposedly encrypted application contents. Meanwhile, tracking the states
of 100,000s of flows concurrently is often indispensable in production-level
middleboxes deployed at real networks.
We present LightBox, the first system that can drive off-site middleboxes at
near-native speed with stateful processing and the most comprehensive
protection to date. Built upon commodity trusted hardware, Intel SGX, LightBox
is the product of our systematic investigation of how to overcome the inherent
limitations of secure enclaves using domain knowledge and customization. First,
we introduce an elegant virtual network interface that allows convenient access
to fully protected packets at line rate without leaving the enclave, as if from
the trusted source network. Second, we provide complete flow state management
for efficient stateful processing, by tailoring a set of data structures and
algorithms optimized for the highly constrained enclave space. Extensive
evaluations demonstrate that LightBox, with all security benefits, can achieve
10Gbps packet I/O, and that with case studies on three stateful middleboxes, it
can operate at near-native speed.Comment: Accepted at ACM CCS 201
An accurate prefetching policy for object oriented systems
PhD ThesisIn the latest high-performance computers, there is a growing requirement for
accurate prefetching(AP) methodologies for advanced object management schemes
in virtual memory and migration systems. The major issue for achieving this goal is that
of finding a simple way of accurately predicting the objects that will be referenced in
the near future and to group them so as to allow them to be fetched same time. The
basic notion of AP involves building a relationship for logically grouping related
objects and prefetching them, rather than using their physical grouping and it relies on
demand fetching such as is done in existing restructuring or grouping schemes. By this,
AP tries to overcome some of the shortcomings posed by physical grouping methods.
Prefetching also makes use of the properties of object oriented languages to
build inter and intra object relationships as a means of logical grouping. This thesis
describes how this relationship can be established at compile time and how it can be
used for accurate object prefetching in virtual memory systems. In addition, AP
performs control flow and data dependency analysis to reinforce the relationships and
to find the dependencies of a program. The user program is decomposed into
prefetching blocks which contain all the information needed for block prefetching such
as long branches and function calls at major branch points.
The proposed prefetching scheme is implemented by extending a C++
compiler and evaluated on a virtual memory simulator. The results show a significant
reduction both in the number of page fault and memory pollution. In particular, AP
can suppress many page faults that occur during transition phases which are
unmanageable by other ways of fetching. AP can be applied to a local and distributed
virtual memory system so as to reduce the fault rate by fetching groups of objects at the
same time and consequently lessening operating system overheads.British Counci
Prediction-Based Energy Saving Mechanism in 3GPP NB-IoT Networks
The current expansion of the Internet of things (IoT) demands improved communication platforms that support a wide area with low energy consumption. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project introduced narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) as IoT communication solutions. NB-IoT devices should be available for over 10 years without requiring a battery replacement. Thus, a low energy consumption is essential for the successful deployment of this technology. Given that a high amount of energy is consumed for radio transmission by the power amplifier, reducing the uplink transmission time is key to ensure a long lifespan of an IoT device. In this paper, we propose a prediction-based energy saving mechanism (PBESM) that is focused on enhanced uplink transmission. The mechanism consists of two parts: first, the network architecture that predicts the uplink packet occurrence through a deep packet inspection; second, an algorithm that predicts the processing delay and pre-assigns radio resources to enhance the scheduling request procedure. In this way, our mechanism reduces the number of random accesses and the energy consumed by radio transmission. Simulation results showed that the energy consumption using the proposed PBESM is reduced by up to 34% in comparison with that in the conventional NB-IoT method
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