Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The communication and computing infrastructure is rapidly evolving towards mobile clients in different formats (handheld phones, tablets or laptop computers) accessing a large number of servers in the cloud. The complexity of that infrastructure has been increasing exponentially over the last several decades with the processors in the clients, servers and networking nodes now running several processor cores in parallel, often with application specific integrated circuits support, with some of these parts consisting in over one billion logic elements (transistors). Adding to this complexity is the increasing reliance on virtualization, for both computing nodes and networking, for fault tolerance, scalability and resource optimization purposes. As a result, even a simple request as initiating a phone call, or making a Web search, can involve several 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 tracing, profiling and debugging multi-core systems will be extended to cover special purpose processors and support circuits (e.g. network processors) and to extract information at several layers from the hardware to the operating system, virtual machines, middleware and application layers. Moreover, a common modeling framework will be developed to combine the information from tracing, profiling and debugging, model the computation nodes, peripherals, communication links and networking nodes, and make that information available to an extensible set of analysis and visualization modules. As a result, the server cluster designers and operators will have the tools in hand to quickly analyze their system performance, find problems and optimize operations.