Title: Characterising the performance of cache-aware placement of virtual machines on a multi-core architecture

Authors: Wesley Emeneker; Amy Apon

Addresses: Computer Science and Computer Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701, USA ' Computer Science and Computer Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701, USA

Abstract: Virtual machine acceptance and deployment has exploded with the advent of cloud computing. Unfortunately, virtual machines negatively impact application performance. For parallel scientific codes, any negative performance impact is undesirable. This paper presents an initial investigation of performance-impacting machine-level events, comparing the Xen virtual machine to native Linux, and using knowledge of the underlying CPU cache architecture to improve relevant cache behaviour. Several machine-level events are gathered, including translation lookaside buffer misses and cache misses. Results from the experiments show that cache-aware virtual machine placement has a significant impact on scientific applications.

Keywords: VM placement; virtual machines; multi-core architectures; last level cache; cache-aware placement; performance; cache awareness; cloud computing; scientific application.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2012.048260

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2012 Vol.10 No.2, pp.84 - 95

Published online: 30 Jul 2012 *

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