HyVM - Hybrid Virtual Machines - Efficient Use of Future Heterogeneous Chip Multiprocessors

Abstract

The HyVM project is developing system support for future heterogeneous chip multiprocessors. Such hybrid hardware platforms offer opportunities in terms of improved power/performance properties, but pose challenges to systems technologies due to heterogeneous processing cores, non-uniform memory access, and complex software stacks. The HyVM project is creating new hypervisor- and system-level abstractions in support of providing a uniform program execution model for future hybrid computing platforms. Rather than treating accelerators as external devices, the model anticipates future integrated systems by providing sets of virtual processing units for use by both accelerator and commodity programs, offering the resource management support needed to efficiently execute such parallel multi-core applications, and supplying the tool chains needed, at hypervisor level, to permit applications to freely use arbitrary combinations of accelerator and commodity cores. The talk will overview the HyVM project, review results that range from efficient methods for virtualizing accelerators, to online techniques for managing heterogenous system resources, to JIT binary translation for dealing with diverse accelerator targets. The effort is driven by both commercial and high performance applications targeting future hybrid machines.