Systems Research Laboratory

Hi All,

This is a summary of last meeting where we defined the next steps to follow, and in which order to do them:

1. Setup the key-value store benchmark (YCSB) to test NBW (file system path).
2. Fix the CPU scheduler bug that could potentially influence the performance degradation shown by some of the benchmarks.
3. Setup the consolidated benchmark using qemu on a Linux host. Two possible options here:
   • Use NBW at the host level and virtualize guest machines without KVM to create memory pressure at the hyper-visor level.
   • Use vanilla host and virtualize guest machines using KVM and let NBW work at the guest level.
   • We plan to set the base comparison level by partitioning statically the physical memory among all the VMs to let fit in memory each working set without problems.
     1. Incrementally we increase the amount of VMs (i.e workloads) so they start competing for memory. We measure the improvements in execution times of NBW compared to the vanilla system.
     2. The result of the benchmark is a vector of execution times where each dimension is the execution time of each workload in the consolidated system. There should be one vector for vanilla and NBW respectively.
4. Depending on time and the results of the key-value benchmark as a file system benchmark, explore other file systems benchmarks as databases or Filebench (possible using MongoDB as back-end)
5. With very low priority, we could rerun the SPEC SFS benchmark to see if there is any improvement by the inclusion of the read-from-patches implementation.

Daniel.