SHF: Medium: Collaborative Research: Micro Virtual Machines for Managed Languages: Abstraction, defined and contained

SHF：媒介：协作研究：托管语言的微型虚拟机：抽象、定义和包含

• 批准号: 1409284
• 负责人: J. Eliot Moss
• 金额: $ 55.77万
• 依托单位: University of Massachusetts Amherst
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-06-15 至 2020-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1409284&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Medium; Collaborative; Research; Micro

Title: Micro Virtual Machines for Managed Languages: Abstraction, containedA large fraction of today's software is written in managed languages. These languages increase software productivity by supporting programming at a very high level, hiding the complexity of modern computer hardware and operating systems. Examples include JavaScript, PHP, Objective-C, Java, C#, Python, and Ruby. These languages have great economic importance. Unfortunately, most of these languages are inefficient, imposing overheads as large as a factor of fifty compared to orthodox language choices such as C. The broader impacts of this research are two-fold: (1) Since managed languages are increasingly becoming economic linchpins, deployed in the engine rooms of global e-commerce platforms and Internet applications (including those of key software companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, and Microsoft), improving the reliability and performance of these managed language platforms will lead to economic efficiencies as well as resource efficiencies in the form of reduced power costs to data centers and improved battery lifetime on mobile devices;(2) Concerning human diversity in the computing field, the research will engage undergraduates from under-represented groups, and encourage them to pursue graduate school and careers in computing and research.This research project is defining, developing, evaluating, and refining the essential components of a new foundation layer for managed language implementation. In doing so, it addresses a key source of systemic inefficiency, by pioneering the "micro virtual machine" (microVM) as an efficient high-performance substrate for managed language implementation. The relationship between a microVM and existing managed language implementations is analogous to that between an operating system micro kernel and monolithic operating systems such as Linux. The microVM captures the insight that there exists a well-defined foundation common to most modern languages that can take responsibility for fundamental abstractions over hardware, concurrency, and memory. By isolating and exposing this substrate, the microVM embodies state-of-the-art base technology available to language implementers while isolating them from the pernicious complexities of these abstractions, freeing them to focus on all-important language-specific optimizations. The research is enabling more efficient software and a distinctly sharper focus for language implementation research and development. The intellectual merits of the research are: (1) Researching and identifying, via prototyping and evaluation, the right microVM abstractions, allowing clean separation of low-level language-neutral and high-level language-specific concerns, capturing the core behaviors, while also admitting high-performance language implementations; (2) Generating secondary research challenges, especially with regard to the effective and efficient combination of abstractions for hardware, concurrency, and memory; and (3) Creating a viable target for formal verification because the microVM has a relatively small code base, thus taking one step on the way towards trustworthy subsystems for assurance of managed software.

标题：托管语言的微型虚拟机：抽象，包含当今软件的大部分，是用托管语言编写的。这些语言通过在很高的水平上支持编程，从而掩盖了现代计算机硬件和操作系统的复杂性，从而提高了软件的生产率。示例包括JavaScript，PHP，Objective-C，Java，C＃，Python和Ruby。这些语言具有很大的经济意义。 Unfortunately, most of these languages are inefficient, imposing overheads as large as a factor of fifty compared to orthodox language choices such as C. The broader impacts of this research are two-fold: (1) Since managed languages are increasingly becoming economic linchpins, deployed in the engine rooms of global e-commerce platforms and Internet applications (including those of key software companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, and Microsoft), improving这些托管语言平台的可靠性和性能将导致经济效率以及以降低数据中心的功率成本和改善移动设备的电池寿命的形式的资源效率；（2）关于计算领域的人类多样性，该研究将吸引研究不足的群体，并鼓励他们的研究群体，并研究研究生的研究，并鼓励他们的研究，并开发了计算机的研究，并开发了计算机，计算机既定的，又有计算机，并将其定义为计算机，并涉及计算机，并涉及计算机的定义。评估并完善新的基础层的基本组成部分，以实现托管语言。在此过程中，它通过开创“微虚拟机”（MicroVM）作为用于托管语言实现的有效的高性能基板来解决系统性低效率的关键来源。 MicroVM与现有的托管语言实现之间的关系类似于操作系统微内核与单片操作系统（例如Linux）之间的关系。 MicroVM捕获了大多数现代语言共有的明确定义的基础的见解，该基础可以负责硬件，并发和记忆的基本抽象。通过隔离和揭露该基材，MicroVM体现了语言实施者可用的最先进的基本技术，同时将它们与这些抽象的有害复杂性隔离，从而使它们释放了它们以专注于最重要的特定语言优化。这项研究正在实现更有效的软件，并明显地焦点是语言实施研究和开发。该研究的智力优点是：（1）通过原型和评估研究和识别正确的MicroVM抽象，从而使低水平的语言中性和高级语言特定于特定于语言的关注度清除，同时捕捉了核心行为，同时也承认了高绩效语言的实施； （2）产生二级研究挑战，尤其是关于硬件，并发和记忆的抽象的有效组合； （3）为正式验证创建一个可行的目标，因为MicroVM具有相对较小的代码库，因此迈出了一步，迈向了可信赖的子系统以确保托管软件。