Abstract

Clouds are a boon to agile organizations. With physical servers, users are relegated to waiting impatiently while others (slowly) approve the server purchase, place the order, ship the server, and install and configure the Operating System (OS) and application stacks. Instead of waiting weeks for others to deliver, the cloud user retains control of the process and can create a new, standalone server in minutes. Unfortunately, few cloud servers stand alone. Driven by the quick instantiation and pay-per-use model, cloud servers are typically members of a variable pool of similarly configured servers performing dynamic and scalable tasks related to parallel computing, data mining, or serving web pages. Because they repeatedly boot new instances from the same, static template, commercial clouds fail to fully deliver on the promise of true on-demand computation. After instantiating the server, the cloud user must still manage cluster membership and broker the addition of new servers. SnowFlock addresses these issues with VM Cloning, our proposed cloud API call. In the same way that application code routinely invokes OS services through a syscall interface, it could now also invoke cloud services through a similar interface. With SnowFlock's VM Cloning, resource allocation, cluster management, and application logic can be interwoven programmatically and dealt with as a single logical operation. The VM Cloning call instantiates multiple cloud servers that are identical copies of the originating parent VM up to the point of cloning. Logically, clones inherit all the state of their parent, including OS- and application-level caches. Further, clones are automatically added to an internal private network, thus effectively joining a dynamically scalable cluster. New computation resources, encapsulated as identical VMs, can be created on-the-fly and can be dynamically leveraged as needed. To be of practical use, VM cloning has to be applicable, efficient, and fast. In this chapter we will describe how SnowFlock's implementation of VM Cloning can be effectively interwoven in several different programming models and frameworks, how it can be implemented to keep application runtime and provider overhead to a minimum, and how it can be used to create dozens of new VMs in five seconds or less. With an API for the programmatic control of VM Cloning with bindings in C, C++, Python and Java, SnowFlock is extremely flexible and versatile. We've successfully used SnowFlock in prototype implementations of several, quite different, systems. In parallel computation scenarios, we've achieved excellent results by explicitly cloning worker VMs that cooperatively distribute the load across many physical hosts. For parallel applications that use the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and typically run on a cluster of dedicated servers, we modified the MPI startup manager to provide unmodified applications with good performance and much less overhead by provisioning a fresh cluster of clones on demand for each run. Finally, in a quite different use case, we used SnowFlock to improve the efficiency and performance of elastic servers. Today's cloud-based elastic servers boot new, cold workers as needed to service spikes in demand. By cloning a running VM instead, SnowFlock brings new workers on line 20 times faster, and because clones inherit the warm buffers of their parent, they reach their peak performance sooner.

 

Manuscript

 

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