[Colloquium] Dinda talk Thursday 12:15 at TTI

[Meridel Trimble]

TOYOTA TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE TALK

Speaker: Peter Dinda
Northwestern
Speaker 's Homepage:  http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~pdinda/

Time: Thursday, April 22nd  2004, 12:15pm
Place: TTI-C (1427 E. 60th St. – 2nd Floor)

Title: Virtuoso: Distributed Computing Using Virtual Machines

Abstract: Virtual machine monitors, such as VMware, Virtual PC, UML, VM, and
many others, provide a powerful mechanism that can be used to greatly simplify
wide-area distributed computing. These tools allow us to lower the level of
abtraction that resource providers can present to their users to the advantage
of both. The Virtuoso abstraction is that of a raw machine with no software. The
user can customize the hardware of his virtual machine(s) (VMs), install
whatever operating system and software he needs, and instantiate and migrate his
VMs to run on whatever resources are most appropriate at any given time. The
system continuously executes measurment, inference, adaptation and resource
reservation techniques on behalf of the user’s VMs.
 
The Virtouso project is developing and extending the middleware services
necessary to make this vision of distributed computing possible. Beyond
introducing Virtuoso in general, this talk will concentrate on the following
specific topics:
 
• Virtual networking We have developed software that overlays an adaptive
protocol-agnostic layer 2 virtual network that connects the user’s virtual
machines, making them appear to be on his local network.
• Measurement and inference The virtual network provides an excellent vantage
point to discover the communications demands of a user’s VMs. From the vantage
point of the virtual network system, we can derive the traffic load matrix and
communication topology. We are now working to measure the communication
capabilities of the underlying network using our transfers. 
• User-centric resource control Providers need to be able to control resource
contention among virtual machines to preseve the illusion of separate machines
to users. This is particularly imporant for interactive VMs. We have studied
user comfort with different kinds and levels of resource contention and are now
developing resource control techniques that use direct user feedback. 
More information and software from this and other work can be found on the
Prescience Lab’s web site at http://plab.cs.northwestern.edu. Anyone with a
Windows computer can join our user comfort study by visiting
http://comfort.cs.northwestern.edu.

This work is in collaboration with several of my students, particularly Ashish
Gupta, Bin Lin, Alex Shoykhet, and Ananth Sundararaj, as well as with the
In-Vigo project at the University of Florida.

Biography
Peter A. Dinda is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science
at Northwestern University. He holds a B.S. in electrical and computer
engineering from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in computer science
from Carnegie Mellon University. His research centers on the intersection of
interactive applications and high performance computing, and in particular on
frameworks, resource discovery, and online performance analysis and prediction
for such applications. He is the recipient of a 2001 NSF CAREER award, and holds
the Slivka junior chair of computer science at Northwestern.
If you have questions, or would like to meet the speaker, please contact Meridel 
at 4-9873 or mtrimble at tti-c.org 
   
For information on future TTI-C talks or events, please go to the TTI-C Events 
page: http://www.tti-c.org/events.shtml