Memvisor: Flexible Memory Mirroring for High Availability via Binary Translation

Staff - Faculty of Informatics

Start date: 28 August 2012

End date: 29 August 2012

DATE: Tuesday, August 28th, 2012
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 14.30

ABSTRACT:
Memory failures are common in clusters, and their destructive effects (e.g., increasing downtime and losing data) make users suffer great loss. Current memory availability strategies mostly require extra expensive hardware. Software approaches based on checkpointing technologies intend to reduce the expense, but their high overhead limits the practical usage.
In this talk, we present a novel system called Memvisor to provide software mirrored memory. Specifically, Memvisor first creates backup space of the same size of the virtual machine (VM) memory. Then, all memory write instructions in VM are duplicated. Data written to VM memory are synchronized to backup space. If memory failures happen, Memvisor will recover the data from the backup space. Compared with traditional software approaches, the instruction-level synchronization lowers the probability of data loss and reduces backup overhead. The results show that even in the worst case, Memvisor outperforms the state-of-the-art software approaches.

BIO:
Zhengwei QI, an associate professor in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, received a B.Eng degree from Northwestern Polytechnical University, in 1999, a M.Eng degree in Computer Science from the same university, in 2002, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, under the supervision of Prof. Jinyuan You, in 2005. After receiving his Ph.D., he taught in the School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, up to now.
Dr. QI leads the System Group in School of Software, SJTU. His research interests are static/dynamic program analysis, model checking, virtual machines, and distributed systems. He has achieved the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 2008 and 2010). From January to July of 2008, he focused on the LTL based dynamic program analysis as a visiting teacher in the system group of Microsoft Research Asia. From 2011 March to 2012 March, he was a visiting scholar in CMU SCS, hosted by Professor Edmund M. Clarke.

HOST: Prof. Matthias Hauswirth / Prof. Walter Binder