EUROSYS

Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) offer superior performance over hard disks for many workloads. A prominent use of SSDs in modern storage systems is to use these devices as a cache in the I/O path. In this work, we examine how transparent, online I/...

SSDs exhibit very different failure characteristics compared to hard drives. In particular, the Bit Error Rate (BER) of an SSD climbs as it receives more writes. As a result, RAID arrays composed from SSDs are subject to correlated failures. By ...

AMD's Advanced Synchronization Facility (ASF) is an x86 instruction set extension proposal intended to simplify and speed up the synchronization of concurrent programs. In this paper, we report our experiences using ASF for implementing transactional ...

In this paper, we study parallelization of multiplayer games using software Transactional Memory (STM) support. We show that the STM provides not only ease of programming, but also better performance than that achievable with state-of-the-art lock-based ...

We present an approach for adaptive scheduling of soft real-time legacy applications (for which no timing information is exposed to the system). Our strategy is based on the combination of two techniques: 1) a real-time monitor that observes the ...

While managed languages such as C# and Java have become quite popular in enterprise computing, they are still considered unsuitable for hard real-time systems. In particular, the presence of garbage collection has been a sore point for their acceptance ...

In this paper, we propose a management framework for protecting large computer systems against operator mistakes. By detecting and confining mistakes to isolated portions of the managed system, our framework facilitates correct operation even by ...

The benefits of virtualized IT environments, such as compute clouds, have drawn interested enterprises to migrate their applications onto new platforms to gain the advantages of reduced hardware and energy costs, increased flexibility and deployment ...

Contemporary datacenters comprise hundreds or thousands of machines running applications requiring high availability and responsiveness. Although a performance crisis is easily detected by monitoring key end-to-end performance indicators (KPIs) such as ...

Heterogeneous architectures that integrate a mix of big and small cores are very attractive because they can achieve high single-threaded performance while enabling high performance thread-level parallelism with lower energy costs. Despite their ...

Symmetric-ISA (instruction set architecture) asymmetric-performance multicore processors were shown to deliver higher performance per watt and area for applications with diverse architectural requirements, and so it is likely that future multicore ...

In multicore systems, shared resources such as caches or the memory subsystem can lead to contention between applications running on different cores, entailing reduced performance and poor energy efficiency. The characteristics of individual ...

This paper presents a technique that helps automate the reverse engineering of device drivers. It takes a closed-source binary driver, automatically reverse engineers the driver's logic, and synthesizes new device driver code that implements the exact ...

The default behavior of all commodity operating systems today is to restart the system when a critical error is encountered in the kernel. This terminates all running applications with an attendant loss of "work in progress" that is nonpersistent.

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Targeting the operating system (OS) kernel, kernel rootkits pose a formidable threat to computer systems and their users. Recent efforts have made significant progress in blocking them from injecting malicious code into the OS kernel for execution. ...

The availability of virtualization features in modern CPUs has reinforced the trend of consolidating multiple guest operating systems on top of a hypervisor in order to improve platform-resource utilization and reduce the total cost of ownership. ...

Building and debugging distributed software remains extremely difficult. We conjecture that by adopting a data-centric approach to system design and by employing declarative programming languages, a broad range of distributed software can be recast ...

Cloud computing offers users the ability to access large pools of computational and storage resources on demand. Multiple commercial clouds already allow businesses to replace, or supplement, privately owned IT assets, alleviating them from the burden ...

MapReduce is a cost-effective way to achieve scalable performance for many log-processing workloads. These workloads typically process their entire dataset. MapReduce can be inefficient, however, when handling business-oriented workloads, especially ...

As organizations start to use data-intensive cluster computing systems like Hadoop and Dryad for more applications, there is a growing need to share clusters between users. However, there is a conflict between fairness in scheduling and data locality (...

A complex software system typically has a large number of objects in the memory, holding references to each other to implement an object model. Deciding when the objects should be alive/active is non-trivial, but the decisions can be security-critical. ...

Combining access control with weakly consistent replication presents a challenge if the resulting system is to support eventual consistency. If authorization policy can be temporarily inconsistent, any given operation may be permitted at one node and ...

Bugs in concurrent programs are extremely difficult to find and fix during testing. In this paper, we propose Kivati, which can efficiently detect and prevent atomicity violation bugs. Kivati imposes an average run-time overhead of 19%, which makes it ...

Debugging real systems is hard, requires deep knowledge of the code, and is time-consuming. Bug reports rarely provide sufficient information, thus forcing developers to turn into detectives searching for an explanation of how the program could have ...

Effective use of CPU data caches is critical to good performance, but poor cache use patterns are often hard to spot using existing execution profiling tools. Typical profilers attribute costs to specific code locations. The costs due to frequent cache ...

IP Multicast (IPMC) in data centers becomes disruptive when the technology is used by a large number of groups, a capability desired by event notification systems. We trace the problem to root causes, and introduce Dr. Multicast (MCMD), a system that ...

Modern Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine replication (BFT) protocols involve about 20,000 lines of challenging C++ code encompassing synchronization, networking and cryptography. They are notoriously difficult to develop, test and prove. We present ...