CSR: Medium: Collaborative Research: Towards Finer-grained Cloud Computing

CSR：媒介：协作研究：迈向更细粒度的云计算

• 批准号: 1819109
• 负责人: Theophilus Benson
• 金额: $ 20.22万
• 依托单位: Brown University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-09-01 至 2020-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1819109&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CSR; Medium; Collaborative; Research; Towards

Over the past few years, cloud computing services like Amazon's EC2 have commoditized computing resources. Despite this success, cloud computing primarily targets users whose virtual machines (VMs) are rarely idle, as cloud users are typically billed for the amount of time the VM is awake, not how much work it does. Thus, services that are long-lived but mostly idle a significant fraction of the time are prohibitively expensive for many potential users of cloud computing. In this project, the PIs are developing a finer-grained model of cloud computation based around lightweight instances. Lightweight instances are more akin to processes than virtual machines; they allow clients to only pay for their actual usage of cloud resources, and to not have the complexity and overhead of running an entire operating system. The lightweight instance approach has the potential to bring the benefits of cloud computing to a variety of users for whom it is a poor fit today. The PIs are exploring a new, finer-granularity model for cloud computing, wherein the cloud makes it appear that all client instances are running all the time, but may actually swap them out while idle to permit statistical multiplexing. Compared to today's VM-based model and container-based model, the proposed process-based model provides a much higher level of abstraction, and lets clients run long-lived, mostly-idle services much more cheaply than is possible today. If successful, the research would open up a wide variety of new applications and architectures: processes could cheaply be run in the cloud on behalf of end users, providing them with the ability to run long-lived services cheaply.

在过去的几年中，诸如亚马逊EC2之类的云计算服务已经商品化了计算资源。 尽管取得了成功，但云计算主要针对的是其虚拟机（VM）很少闲置的用户，因为云用户通常会在VM醒着的时间内收取云用户的费用，而不是它的工作量。 因此，对于许多潜在的云计算用户而言，长期寿命但大部分时间闲置的服务非常昂贵。 在这个项目中，PI正在开发基于轻量级实例的云计算的细粒度模型。 轻巧的实例比虚拟机更类似于过程。他们允许客户仅支付其实际使用云资源的费用，并且没有运行整个操作系统的复杂性和开销。 轻巧的实例方法有可能将云计算的好处带给当今差的各种用户。 PI正在探索一种用于云计算的新的，更精细的粒度模型，其中云使所有客户端实例似乎一直在运行，但实际上可能在闲置时将它们交换出来以允许统计多路复用。 与当今基于VM的模型和基于容器的模型相比，提出的基于过程的模型提供了更高的抽象水平，并且可以让客户运行悠久的，大多数的IDLE服务比今天可能的便宜得多。 如果成功的话，这项研究将开放各种新的应用程序和架构：可以代表最终用户廉价地在云中运行流程，从而使他们能够便宜地运行长期的服务。