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Writeback throttling in a virtualized system with SCM

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Abstract

Storage class memory (SCM) has the potential to revolutionize the memory landscape by its non-volatile and byte-addressable properties. However, there is little published work about exploring its usage for modern virtualized cloud infrastructure. We propose SCM-vWrite, a novel architecture designed around SCM, to ease the performance interference of virtualized storage subsystem. Through a case study on a typical virtualized cloud system, we first describe why current writeback manners are not suitable for a virtualized environment, then design and implement SCM-vWrite to improve this problem. We also use typical benchmarks and realistic workloads to evaluate its performance. Compared with the traditional method on a conventional architecture, the experimental result shows that SCM-vWrite can coordinate the writeback flows more effectively among multiple co-located guest operating systems, achieving a better disk I/O performance without any loss of reliability.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China

    Dingding Li, Yong Tang & Gansen Zhao

  2. School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Xiaofei Liao & Hai Jin

Authors
  1. Dingding Li
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  2. Xiaofei Liao
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  3. Hai Jin
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  4. Yong Tang
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  5. Gansen Zhao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dingding Li.

Additional information

Dingding Li is a postdoctoral fellow of Computer Science at South China Normal University, China. His research is focused around I/O virtualization and cloud computing.

Xiaofei Liao is a professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. His research interests are in the areas of virtualization technology for computing system, P2P system, cluster computing and streaming services.

Hai Jin is a professor and Dean of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. His research interests include virtualization technology for computing system, cluster computing and grid computing, peer-to-peer computing, network storage, network security, and high assurance computing.

Yong Tang is a professor and Dean of the School of Computer Science at South China Normal University, China. His current interests include temporal database, cooperative computing, cloud computing and social network services.

Gansen Zhao is a full professor of Computer Science at South China Normal University, China. His main research interests include trust management, authentication, virtualization security in cloud computing, and massive data processing.

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Li, D., Liao, X., Jin, H. et al. Writeback throttling in a virtualized system with SCM. Front. Comput. Sci. 10, 82–95 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-4217-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-015-4217-8

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