A 2-VM: A cooperative Java VM with support for resource-awareness and cluster-wide thread scheduling

Abstract

In today's scenarios of large scale computing and service providing, the deployment of distributed infrastructures, namely computer clusters, is a very active research area. In recent years, the use of Grids, Utility and Cloud Computing, shows that these are approaches with growing interest and applicability, as well as scientific and also commercial impact. This work presents the design and implementation issues of a cooperative VM for a distributed execution environment that is resource-aware and policy-driven. Nodes cooperate to achieve efficient management of the available local and global resources. We propose A2-VM , a cooperative cluster-enabled virtual execution environment for Java, to be deployed on Grid sites and Cloud data-centers that usually comprise a number of federated clusters. This cooperative VM has the ability to monitor base mechanisms (e.g. thread scheduling, garbage collection, memory or network consumptions) to assess application's performance and reconfigure these mechanisms in run-time according to previously defined resource allocation policies. We have designed this new cluster runtime by extending the Jikes Research Virtual Machine to incorporate resource awareness (namely resource consumption and restrictions), and extending the TerraCotta DSO with a distributed thread scheduling mechanism driven by policies that take into account resource utilization. In this paper we also discuss the cost of activating such mechanisms, focusing on the overhead of measuring/metering resource usage and performing policy evaluation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.