[talks] M Ali general exam

[Melissa Lawson]

Muneeb Ali will present his research seminar/general exam on Thursday May 20 at 10AM in 
Room 402.  The members of his committee are:  Mike Freedman (advisor), Jennifer Rexford, 
and Larry Peterson.  Everyone is invited to attend his talk and those faculty wishing to remain 
for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.  His abstract and reading list follow below.

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Title: SWAM: A System for Wide-Area Migration

-- Abstract --

The recent interest in cloud services is driven by the
industrialization of the datacenter as a reliable provider of
computing needs. Datacenters typically employ virtualization
technologies (e.g., VMware ESXi and Citrix Xen) to better utilize and
manage the physical resources. Virtual machines (VMs) can migrate
on-the-fly, from one physical machine to another, to improve
utilization, handle load spikes, and/or save power. However, these
benefits are typically limited to resources within a single datacenter
or, even worse, a single broadcast domain. Wide-area migration can
enable resource sharing across physically apart locations, but
efficiently migrating VMs over the wide-area is non-trivial. We
identify the practical challenges in wide-area VM migration and
propose a system, called SWAM, that aims to achieve efficient
wide-area migration by reducing the time needed to transfer large
(typically 8-10 GB) virtual disk images.

SWAM leverages the fact that a VM disk image will have similarities in
binary content (e.g., OS or program files) with other VMs running in a
datacenter. Often VM images are "cloned" from generic base images and
this often leads to high similarity between the binary content of
different VMs. Further, a VM may migrate back and forth between the
same servers and old versions of the disk image may be available on
(or near) the target host. Our primary goal is to reduce the total
migration time, especially the time in which the VM is non-responsive.
SWAM aims to achieve this goal by a) enabling parallel download of
content chunks from local peers within a datacenter, and b) providing
mechanisms for quickly detecting and transferring disk image changes
(deltas). We present results from a prototype implementation using VM
images of Xen and KVM.

--Papers--

[1] M. Harchol-Balter and A. B. Downey, "Exploiting process lifetime
distributions for dynamic load balancing", ACM Trans. Comput. Syst.
15(3), pp 253-285, Aug. 1997

[2] A. Muthitacharoen, B. Chen, and D. Mazieres, "A low-bandwidth
network file system", SOSP 2001, pp 174�187, Banff, Canada, Oct. 2001

[3] C. A. Waldspurger, "Memory resource management in VMware ESX
server", OSDI 2002, pp 181�194, Boston, MA, Dec. 2002

[4] C. P. Sapuntzakis, R. Chandra, B. Pfaff, J. Chow, M. S. Lam, and
M. Rosenblum, "Optimizing the migration of virtual computers", OSDI
2002, pp 377�390, Boston, MA, Dec. 2002

[5] I. Stoica, D. Adkins, S. Zhuang, S. Shenker, and S. Surana,
"Internet indirection infrastructure", SIGCOMM 2002, pp 73-86,
Pittsburgh, PA, Aug 2002

[6] P. Barham, B. Dragovic, K. Fraser, S. Hand, T. Harris, A. Ho, R.
Neugebauer, I. Pratt, and A. War?eld, "Xen and the art of
virtualization", SOSP 2003, pp 164�177, Bolton Landing, NY, Oct. 2003

[7] I. Stoica, R. Morris, D. Liben-Nowell, D. R. Karger, M. Frans
Kaashoek, F. Dabek, and H. Balakrishnan, "Chord: a scalable
peer-to-peer lookup protocol for internet applications", IEEE/ACM
Trans. Netw. 11(1): 17-32 (2003)

[8] C. Clark, K. Fraser, S. Hand, J. G. Hansen, E. Jul, C. Limpach, I.
Pratt, and A. Warfield, "Live Migration of Virtual Machines", NSDI
2005, pp 273-286, Boston, MA, May 2005

[9] H. Pucha, D. G. Andersen, and M. Kaminsky, "Exploiting similarity
for multi-source downloads using ?le handprints", NSDI 2007,
Cambridge, MA, Apr. 2007

[10] D. Gupta, S. Lee, M. Vrable, S. Savage, A. Snoeren, G. Varghese,
G. Voelker, and A. Vahdat, "Difference Engine: Harnessing memory
redundancy in virtual machines", OSDI 2008, pp 309�322, San Diego, CA,
Dec. 2008

--Textbook--

[11] L. L. Peterson and B. S. Davie, Computer Networks, Fourth
Edition: a Systems Approach. 2007, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.