Virtual Machine Workloads: The Case for New NAS Benchmarks

Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Virtual Machines (VMs) are widely used in data centers thanks to their manageability, scalability, and ability to consolidate resources. But the shift from physical to virtual clients drastically changes the I/O workloads to seen on NAS servers, due to guest file system encapsulation in virtual disk images and the multiplexing of request streams from different VMs. Unfortunately, current NAS workload generators and benchmarks produce workloads typical to physical machines. This paper makes two contributions. First, we studied the extent to which virtualization is changing existing NAS workloads. We observed significant changes, including the disappearance of file system meta-data operations at the NAS layer, changed I/O sizes, and increased randomness. Second, we created a set of versatile NAS benchmarks to synthesize virtualized workloads. This allows us to generate accurate virtualized workloads without the effort and limitations associated with setting up a full virtualized environment. Our experiments demonstrate that relative error of our virtualized benchmarks, evaluated across 11 parameters, averages less than 10%

Extending GCC with Modular GIMPLE Optimizations

We present a system of plug-ins for GCC that allows GCC to load GIMPLE transformations at run-time. This system reduces the support effort required for GCC by separating transformations from the core compiler. It also makes it possible for developers not connected with the GCC project to develop and distribute transformations independently. We demonstrate two plug-ins we have developed with this system, one of which reduces the effort required to develop transformations significantly by allowing visualization of the GCC controlflow graph and the GIMPLE tree structure. We enumerate portions of the compiler that could be extracted into plug-ins, and describe future applications of the plug-in system.