CSR: CC: Large: A High-Performance Data Center Operating System

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Today, many popular cloud data center applications spend a huge fraction of their time running operating system code. Examples include the backend services implementing Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other popular websites. These applications spend much of their time moving, processing, and storing data. In a traditional operating system, however, the operating system kernel mediates all network and storage access, as a means to provide application, data, and network security within the data center. Thus, the code path for a network or storage request to traverse from application code through the kernel to the device hardware (and back again) is many times longer than the minimum required. This work streamlines the performance of these applications without compromising security by changing the roles of the operating systems kernel, application runtime library, and device hardware. Instead, the traditional role of the kernel is split in two. Applications have direct access to virtualized I/O devices, allowing most I/O operations to skip the kernel entirely. The kernel operates primarily in the control plane, establishing and limiting data plane connections in accordance with the operating system security policy. The work has the potential for dramatic improvements in application and server performance, as well as data center energy consumption and protocol flexibility. Network and storage intensive data center applications are used by literally billions of people around the globe on a daily basis. By reducing the overhead of network and storage these applications, the hardware needed to support existing services can be reduced, making it cheaper for new services to be developed.