Grant: Department of National Defence / NSERC Research Partnership

The electronic revolution started in the late 1960s has already profoundly impacted our daily lives both at home and in the office. Online electronic services are now intensively used for communications (wired and wireless telephone, text messaging, voice and video over IP), shopping, entertainment (multiplayer games) and information gathering. This revolution is accelerating and reaching much farther than anticipated. New services now include online third and fourth generation mobile devices acting as telephone, Internet gateway, music player, camera and geographical navigation system. All these new services rely on an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure composed of powerful servers with numerous clients taking the form of desktop or mobile devices, and more importantly the system and networking software. Computer central processing units have evolved from simple processors to multi-core systems. Finding performance, timing or functional problems, or detecting security breaches, is increasingly difficult with these sophisticated high performance networked systems. Because suitably fast and accurate tracing and monitoring tools are not available, this results in longer development cycles, operations and maintenance support nightmares, or poorly optimized systems. The aim of this project is to develop techniques and algorithms to provide a suitable software achitecture for low overhead tracing and monitoring tools for these complex distributed multi-core systems. The tools will enable operators to trace the complete software stack, from hypervisor to operating system, virtual execution engine and user applications. Sophisticated trace analysis tools will detect patterns of faulty behavior, and associate the trace events to a model of the computer system or service in order to explain how the total execution time is spent.