Turning down the lamp: Software specialisation for the cloud

© USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, HotCloud 2010.All right reserved. The wide availability of cloud computing offers an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how we construct applications. The cloud is currently mostly used to package up existing software stacks and operating systems (e.g. LAMP) for scaling out websites. We instead view the cloud as a stable hardware platform, and present a programming framework which permits applications to be constructed to run directly on top of it without intervening software layers. Our prototype (dubbed Mirage) is unashamedly academic; it extends the Objective Caml language with storage extensions and a custom run-time to emit binaries that execute as a guest operating system under Xen. Mirage applications exhibit significant performance speedups for I/O and memory handling versus the same code running under Linux/Xen. Our results can be generalised to offer insight into improving more commonly used languages such as PHP, Python and Ruby, and we discuss lessons learnt and future directions

An architecture for interspatial communication

Digital infrastructure in modern urban environments is currently very Internet-centric, and involves transmitting data to physically remote environments. The cost for this is data insecurity, high response latency and unpredictable reliability of services. In this paper, we lay out a software architecture that inverts the current model by building an operating system designed to securely connect physical spaces with extremely low latency, high bandwidth local-area computation capabilities and service discovery. We describe our early prototype design OSMOSE, which is based on unikernels and a distributed store

Jitsu: Just-in-time summoning of unikernel

Network latency is a problem for all cloud services. It can be mitigated by moving computation out of remote datacenters by rapidly instantiating local services near the user. This requires an embedded cloud platform on which to deploy multiple applications securely and quickly. We present Jitsu, a new Xen toolstack that satisfies the demands of secure multi-tenant isolation on resource-constrained embedded ARM devices. It does this by using unikernels: lightweight, compact, single address space, memory-safe virtual machines (VMs) written in a high-level language. Using fast shared memory channels, Jitsu provides a directory service that launches unikernels in response to network traffic and masks boot latency. Our evaluation shows Jitsu to be a power-efficient and responsive platform for hosting cloud services in the edge network while preserving the strong isolation guarantees of a type-1 hypervisor.The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 under the Trilogy 2 project (grant agreement no. 317756), and the User Centric Networking project, (grant agreement no. 611001), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), under contract FA8750-11-C-0249.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from USENIX via https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi15/technical-sessions/presentation/madhavapedd

Causal message sequence charts

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)4703 LNCS166-18

Realizability of Dynamic MSC Languages

We introduce dynamic communicating automata (DCA), an extension of communicating finite-state machines that allows for dynamic creation of processes. Their behavior can be described as sets of message sequence charts (MSCs). We consider the realizability problem for DCA: given a dynamic MSC grammar (a high-level MSC specification), is there a DCA defining the same set of MSCs? We show that this problem is EXPTIME-complete. Moreover, we identify a class of realizable grammars that can be implemented by finite DCA