Composable IO: a novel resource sharing platform in personal Clouds

Abstract

A fundamental goal for Cloud computing is to group resources to accomplish tasks that may require strong computing or communication capability. In this paper we design specific resource sharing technology under which IO peripherals can be shared among Cloud members. In particular, in a personal Cloud that is built up by a number of personal devices, IO peripherals at any device can be applied to support application running at another device. We call this IO sharing composable IO because it is equivalent to composing IOs from different devices for an application. We design composable USB and achieve pro-migration USB access, namely a migrated application running at the targeted host can still access the USB IO peripherals at the source host. This is supplementary to traditional VM migration under which application can only use resources from the device where the application runs. We address reliability issues by keeping a backup VM. In addition, we define a security framework to ensure operating environment security when using composable IO in personal environment. Experimental results show that through composable IO applications in personal Cloud can achieve much better user experience.