Title
Opportunistic Spinlocks: Achieving Virtual Machine Scalability in the Clouds.
Abstract
With increasing demand for big-data processing and faster in-memory databases, cloud providers are moving towards large virtualized instances besides focusing on the horizontal scalability. However, our experiments reveal that such instances in popular cloud services (e.g., 32 vCPUs with 208 GB supported by Google Compute Engine) do not achieve the desired scalability with increasing core count even with a simple, embarrassingly parallel job (e.g., Linux kernel compile). On a serious note, the internal synchronization scheme (e.g., paravirtualized ticket spinlock) of the virtualized instance on a machine with higher core count (e.g., 80-core) dramatically degrades its overall performance. Our finding is different from the previously well-known scalability problem (i.e., lock contention problem) and occurs because of the sophisticated optimization techniques implemented in the hypervisor---what we call sleepy spinlock anomaly. To solve this problem, we design and implement OTICKET, a variant of paravirtualized ticket spinlock that effectively scales the virtualized instances in both undersubscribed and oversubscribed environments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2903267.2903271
Operating Systems Review
Field
DocType
Volume
Synchronization,Virtual machine,Computer science,Embarrassingly parallel,Ticket,Real-time computing,Spinlock,Operating system,Linux kernel,Cloud computing,Scalability,Distributed computing
Journal
50
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
0163-5980
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.48
11
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sanidhya Kashyap112410.92
Changwoo Min229429.89
Taesoo Kim380951.85