Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The communication and computing infrastructure is rapidly evolving towards mobile clients in different formats (handheld phones, tablets or on-board systems in cars) accessing a large number of servers in the Cloud. The complexity of that infrastructure has been increasing rapidly over the last several decades with the processors in the clients, servers and networking nodes now running many processor cores in parallel, often with application specific hardware support (video or network processing). Some of these hardware modules contain over one billion logic elements (transistors). Adding to this complexity is the increasing reliance on virtualization, which hides the specificities of the hardware and let an application run on several different models, but makes the performance more difficult to analyse. As a result, even a simple request like initiating a phone call, or making a Web search, can involve many parallel processors on several servers. Moreover, the same request issued a few seconds later may be served in a different way by different physical servers. Therefore, understanding the performance of these services has become extremely difficult and the tools for that purpose are severely lacking. In this project, existing tools for monitoring, profiling and debugging many-core systems will be extended in several ways, to share common mechanisms for data measurement and extraction, and to extract information from several layers (hardware, operating system, virtual machines, middleware and application layers). Similarly, the tools to analyse this extracted data will be extended to operate in parallel and to relate the data to the high level program constructs designed by the software engineers. As a result, the designers and operators of distributed applications on mobile devices and cloud servers will have the tools in hand to quickly analyze their system performance, find problems and optimize operations.