The vMatrix
Amr A. Awadallah - Mendel Rosenblum
aaa@cs.stanford.edu - mendel@cs.stanford.edu
Computer Systems Lab -
EE Department -
Stanford University
PhD Orals and Thesis:
Publications:
-
"The vMatrix: Equi-Ping Game Server Placement For Pre-Arranged First-Person-Shooter Multiplayer Matches" (PDF),
Amr A. Awadallah and Mendel Rosenblum,
The 4th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA 2006), Dubai/Sharjah, UAE, March 2006.
(Powerpoint Talk)
-
"The vMatrix: Server Switching" (PDF),
Amr A. Awadallah and Mendel Rosenblum,
IEEE 10th International Workshop on Future Trends in Distributed Computing Systems (IEEE FTDCS 2004), Suzhou, China, May 2004.
(Powerpoint Talk)
-
"The vMatrix: A Network of Virtual Machine Monitors for Dynamic Content Distribution" (PDF),
Amr A. Awadallah and Mendel Rosenblum,
7th International Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution (WCW 2002), Boulder, Colorado, August 2002.
(Powerpoint Talk,
Conference Photo
)
Presentations:
- Amr A. Awadallah and Mendel Rosenblum,
"The vMatrix: Equi-Ping Game Server Placement For Pre-Arranged First-Person-Shooter Multiplayer Matches" (powerpoint),
The 4th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA 2006), Dubai/Sharjah, UAE, March 2006.
- Amr A. Awadallah and Mendel Rosenblum,
"The vMatrix: Server Switching" (powerpoint),
IEEE 10th International Workshop on Future Trends in Distributed Computing Systems (IEEE FTDCS 2004), Suzhou, China, May 2004.
- Amr A. Awadallah and Mendel Rosenblum,
"The vMatrix: Teleporting Servers via Virtual Machine Monitors" (Power Point),
USENIX LISA 2002 Work In Progress, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nov 2002. [This talk
was voted the 2nd runner up for the WiP Whip session.]
- Amr A. Awadallah, Ben Ling, and Armando Fox,
"Internet Scale Architecural Properties and Primitives" (Power Point),
Stanford-Berkeley ROC Miniretreat, Santa Cruz, California, September 2002.
- Amr A. Awadallah and Mendel Rosenblum,
"The vMatrix: Teleporting Servers via Virtual Machine Monitors" (Power Point),
ACM MobiCom 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, September 2002.
- Amr A. Awadallah and Mendel Rosenblum,
"The vMatrix: A Network of Virtual Machine Monitors for Dynamic Content Distribution" (powerpoint),
7th International Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution (WCW 2002), Boulder, Colorado, August 2002.
Funny Matrix Videos (I use some of these after the talks to end with a good laugh):
Introduction:
Internet/Web systems have inherent difficulties with standardization
of scalability, interactivity, availability and efficiency. Many
internet infrastructure solutions have been proposed to address these
problems, however, these solutions involve significant changes to the
existing legacy system architectures and administration methodologies
leading to extremely high switching costs.
We make the observation that Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) can be
used to address these problems. VMMs were introduced in the 1970s by IBM
to arbitrate access between a number of OSes to expensive mainframes.
VMMs died in the 1980s as the PC became main stream, but they were
resurrected recently for portability, compatibility, and isolation reasons.
Hypothesis:
It is the goal of this work to show that it is possible to encapsulate
legacy Internet services via VMMs, to achieve a standardized solution for
improving the scalability, interactivity, availability, and efficiency of
web services without requiring cost prohibitive changes to existing system
architectures.
The vMatrix:
The name The vMatrix comes from the analogy to the popular sci-fi movie
The Matrix.
In the movie, machines controlled humans by virtualizing all their external senses;
we propose doing the same back to the machines!
It is a virtual matrix of real machine hosts running VMM software, these
hosts are ready to be possessed by guest VMs (ghosts) encapsulating
internet services. The Internet service owner gets a map of the world
were he/she can see all locations with available real servers then
adjust a knob to increase the number of instances of any internet
service at any location with a demand hot spot.
Definitions:
- Scalability: The ease with which an internet service can be
adapted to handle higher demand without quality degradation.
- Interactivity: The responsiveness of an internet service as
perceived by end users.
- Availability: The duration an internet service is perceived as
up and running by end users.
- Efficiency: The degree to which an internet system performs its
designated functions with minimum consumption of resources
(CPUs, Memories, Network, Humans, ... )
- Cost Prohibitive: A cost prohibitive transition is one in which
the human time involved in switching over to the new
framework is more expensive than can be validated by the
rewards to be achieved from the new framework.
Practical Applications:
- Dynamic Content Distribution: Real-time movement of servers closer to predicted demand hot spots. Pros: Interactivity, Availability, and Scalability.
- Server Multiplexing: Sharing a server farm between services/properties. Pros: Efficiency and Scalability.
- Warm Standbys: Sharing real servers between a primary VM and a suspended ready-to-go backup VM which takes over if primary fails. Pros: Availability and Efficiency.
Initial Classification of Internet Architectures
- Single Tier
- Two Tier - Read Only Backend
- Two Tier - Read/Write Backend
- Two Tier - Write By One User / Read by Many Users
Related Links
(Last Updated 6/20/07 by Amr A. Awadallah)
