Student research opportunities
Porting the Xen Hypervisor to Intel's Single-Chip Cloud Computer
Project Code: CECS_655
This project is available at the following levels:
CS single semester, Honours, Summer Scholar, Masters
Keywords:
virtualization, manycore computing, cloud computing
Supervisor:
Dr Peter StrazdinsOutline:
The Intel Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is a state-of-the-art experimental manycore chip multiprocessor. On this chip, there are 48 cores. Unlike previous CMPs, these cores communicate using message passing rather than by shared memory. This is because the later requires cache coherency, which is not scalable with respect to energy or computation time with large number of cores. Thus, in terms of programming model and balance between compute and communicate speed, the SCC is very much like a cluster on a chip. Each SCC core is based on the P45C processor.
However, the programming environment to the SCC is very basic and it does not currently support virtualization.
Goals of this project
This project will investigate porting the Xen hypervisor (KVM or others could as well be used instead) to the SCC. It is not trivial since the P45C predates Xen support and the SCC introduces its own limitations. An in-depth analysis of the low level requirements of Xen and the capabilities of the SCC environment by ANU Vacation Scholar Qian Ge in 2012 has shown this is feasible. A preliminary attempt by ANU Vacation Scholar Richard lee (2013) showed how the BareMichael infrastructure can be used to support the port. Now the full port must be attempted and the resulting issues evaluated.
Requirements/Prerequisites
Existing knowledge of the internals of an operating system, e.g. Linux. This project is of high technical difficulty.
Student Gain
Only a very few universities around the world have an SCC! This chip represents the future of manycore processing. Successfully completing this project will be of great interest to the SCC community.
Links
The Intel SCCXen
