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Freezing time emulating new and faster devices with virtual machines

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Abstract

Recent proposals of emerging data storage devices make it necessary to reevaluate all levels of the storage hierarchy to optimize the software stack performance. However, these new devices are not always widely available and therefore early experiments may be impossible. Emulators aim at mimicking as close as possible the behavior of a component, nonetheless, emulating new and fast storage devices is a challenging task due to time perception. In this work, we propose an approach to emulate storage devices using virtual machines (VMs) allowing the evaluation of a new device within a real system. We use a technique called freezing time, which pauses a VM to manipulate its clock and hide the real I/O completion time. Our approach is implemented at the hypervisor level and it is transparent to the guest operating system or application. We evaluate the technique under a real system using regular magnetic disks to emulate faster storage devices. Our method presented a latency error of 6.5% compared to a real device. Moreover, decoupled experiment between two laboratories, at the Barcelona Super Computing Center (BSC) in Spain, and the Center of Computer Science and Free Software (C3SL) in Brazil, demonstrated that our approach is reproducible and promising to allow the virtual evaluation of next-gen storage devices.

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Adapted from Lu et al. (2016)

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Notes

  1. Boxplots give an impression of how values of a group are distributed. The middle 50% of all values are within the box itself and the so-called whiskers have a length of at most 1.5-times the interquartile range.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the TIN2015-65316 Grant, the Generalitat de Catalunya under contract 2014-SGR-1051, the Serrapilheira Institute (Grant number Serra-1709-16621), as well as the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under Grant Agreement no. 671951 (NEXTGenIO) for the extensions added after the MASCOTS paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), Curitiba, Brazil

    Luis C. E. Bona, Alessandro Elias, Andre P. Ziviani & Marco A. Z. Alves

  2. Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Barcelona, Spain

    Ramon Nou

  3. Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain

    Toni Cortes

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  1. Luis C. E. Bona
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  2. Alessandro Elias
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  3. Andre P. Ziviani
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  4. Ramon Nou
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  5. Toni Cortes
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  6. Marco A. Z. Alves
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Correspondence to Alessandro Elias.

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Bona, L.C.E., Elias, A., Ziviani, A.P. et al. Freezing time emulating new and faster devices with virtual machines. CCF Trans. HPC 2, 3–15 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42514-020-00023-y

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