Paper Info
Title
Micro-architectural characterization of desktop cloud workloads
Abstract
Desktop cloud replaces traditional desktop computers with completely virtualized systems from the cloud. It is becoming one of the fastest growing segments in the cloud computing market. However, as far as we know, there is little work done to understand the behavior of desktop cloud. On one hand, desktop cloud workloads are different from conventional data center workloads in that they are rich with interactive operations. Desktop cloud workloads are different from traditional non-virtualized desktop workloads in that they have an extra layer of software stack - hypervisor. On the other hand, desktop cloud servers are mostly built with conventional commodity processors. While such processors are well optimized for traditional desktops and high performance computing workloads, their effectiveness for desktop cloud workloads remains to be studied. As an attempt to shed some lights on the effectiveness of conventional general-purpose processors on desktop cloud workloads, we have studied the behavior of desktop cloud workloads and compared it with that of SPEC CPU2006, TPC-C, PARSEC, and CloudSuite. We evaluate a Xen-based virtualization platform. The performance results reveal that desktop cloud workloads have significantly different characteristics with SPEC CPU2006, TPC-C and PARSEC, but they perform similarly with data center scale-out benchmarks from CloudSuite. In particular, desktop cloud workloads have high instruction cache miss rate (12.7% on average), high percentage of kernel instructions (23%, on average), and low IPC (0.36 on average). And they have much higher TLB miss rates and lower utilization of off-chip memory bandwidth than traditional benchmarks. Our experimental numbers indicate that the effectiveness of existing commodity processors is quite low for desktop cloud workloads. In this paper, we provide some preliminary discussions on some potential architectural and micro-architectural enhancements. We hope that the performance numbers presented - n this paper will give some insights to the designers of desktop cloud systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/IISWC.2012.6402917
IISWC
Keywords
Field
DocType
hypervisor,traditional desktop computer,desktop cloud servers,xen-based virtualization platform,traditional non-virtualized desktop workloads,ipc,cache storage,desktop cloud server,off-chip memory bandwidth,desktop cloud system,virtual machines,commodity processors,micro-architectural characterization,microarchitectural characterization,software performance evaluation,virtualized systems,virtualisation,spec cpu2006,conventional data center workloads,software stack,kernel instructions,cloud computing,tlb miss rates,desktop cloud,interactive operations,instruction cache miss rate,desktop cloud workloads,high performance computing workloads,cloud computing market
Virtualization,Virtual machine,Memory bandwidth,Supercomputer,Computer science,Parallel computing,Hypervisor,Real-time computing,Translation lookaside buffer,Data center,Operating system,Cloud computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4673-4531-6
2
0.52
References 
Authors
12
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tao Jiang1153.31
Rui Hou2116.45
Lixin Zhang357145.96
Ke Zhang47521.74
Licheng Chen51039.74
Ming-yu Chen690279.29
SUN Ning-Hui7126897.37