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                    Seminar Announcement

            School of Computer Science, CECS
             The Australian National University
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Date:  Thursday, 28 May 2009
Time:  4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]


Speaker: Muhummad Atif

Title: Optimizing Live Migration of Virtual Machines in SMP Clusters


Abstract:

 Live migration is one of the most useful features provided by todays'
 virtual machine monitors (VMM). It enables seamless hardware upgrades,
 provides fault tolerance, achieves load balancing and saves power
 through server consolidation. These features can also be beneficial in
 HPC environments. This talk presents a comprehensive study of the
 migration facility of the Xen VMM, specifically targeting HPC
 applications. We analyze the effects of live and non-live migration
 techniques on HPC application wall times. A detailed relationship of the
 migration routine with memory modification, communication sensitivity
 and CPU contention between guest VMs and the host VMM will also be
 presented.

 A simple optimization for the live migration feature will also be
 presented in the seminar. Our optimization is able to reduce the total
 number of memory pages transferred during the migration by up to 500% 
 and results show an average of 50% improvement over the default Xen
 migration routine on the traditional gigabit Ethernet infrastructure. We
 also demonstrate that live migration of virtual machines in an HPC
 environment can be used to improve application wall times.



Biography:

 Muhammad Atif has done a Masters in Software Engineering from the National
 University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan. In 2003, he was
 awarded the prestigious president's gold medal for his excellent
 academic record at his university. He is currently pursuing PhD in the
 field of high performance computing (HPC) from the Department of
 Computer Science. His research interests includes virtualization of
 operating systems and performance estimation of HPC applications.



URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars09/dept20090528




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