Rethinking multicore application scalability on big virtual machines

Jianchen Shan, Weiwei Jia, Xiaoning Ding

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Virtual machine (VM) sizes keep increasing in the cloud. However, little attention has been paid to analyze and understand the scalability of multicore applications on big VMs with multiple virtual CPUs (VCPUs), assuming that application scalability on VMs can be analyzed in the same ways as that on physical machines (PMs). The paper demonstrates that, since hardware CPU resource is dynamically allocated to VCPUs, the executions of multicore applications on VMs show different scalability from those on PMs. The paper systematically studies how the virtualization of CPU resource changes execution scalability, identifies key application features and system factors that affect execution scalability on VMs, and investigates possible directions to improve scalability. The paper presents a few important findings. First, the execution scalability of applications on VMs is determined by different factors than those on PMs. Second, virtualization and resource sharing can improve scalability by nature. Thus, applications may show better scalability on VMs than on PMs. Linear scalability can be achieved even when there is substantial sequential computation. Third, there is still much space to further improve execution scalability by enhancing system designs. Better scalability can be achieved by increasing allocation period length and/or matching resource allocation and workload distribution.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2017 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ICPADS 2017
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages694-701
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781538621295
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2 2017
Event23rd IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ICPADS 2017 - Shenzhen, China
Duration: Dec 15 2017Dec 17 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems - ICPADS
Volume2017-December
ISSN (Print)1521-9097

Other

Other23rd IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ICPADS 2017
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShenzhen
Period12/15/1712/17/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Hardware and Architecture

Keywords

  • Cloud computing
  • Multicore
  • Resource sharing
  • Scalability
  • Virtual machine

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