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Interprocess Communication Mechanisms With Inter-Virtual Machine Shared Memory
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- Author / Creator
- Ke, Xiaodi
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In many cloud computing environments (e.g., Amazon’s public Elastic Computing Cloud and Openstack for private clouds), virtual machine (VM) instances are the unit of resource allocation. When possible, VM instances can be allocated on the same physical server and many techniques (e.g., using shared memory between VMs) can be used to reduce the overhead of the inter-VM communication.
Nahanni is a novel inter-VM shared-memory mechanism. We investigate two inter-VM interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms using Nahanni shared memory. First, minitransactions have different semantics from both traditional shared-memory programming and message-passing
programming. We experimentally show that minitransactions can have better performance than traditional lock-based programming under low-contention scenarios. Second, MPI-Nahanni ports the well-known Message-Passing Interface (MPI) system to Nahanni. Using microbenchmarks and the
GAMESS application, we show how MPI-Nahanni has higher bandwidth and lower latency (by up to an order of magnitude or more), and better performance than existing VM-based IPC techniques. -
- Graduation date
- Fall 2011
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Science
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.