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Making the Case for Highly Efficient Multicore Enabled Unikernels With IncludeOS

Authors:
Maghsoud Morshedi
Hårek Haugerud
Kyrre Begnum

Keywords: Cloud computing; energy efficiency; green comput- ing; Unikernel; multicore computing

Abstract:
Today’s data centers utilized for cloud services rep- resent a significant energy consumption and costs. Standard operating systems used for cloud instances are still designed largely to run on actual or emulated hardware, making them wasteful when being idle. Ideally, the cloud should be populated with leaner and more efficient operating systems. Unikernel op- erating systems are a good example of such, but most Unikernels are still not ready to be used in a cloud as they are built on specialized emulators. Furthermore, they are designed for single core operation and it is impractical to run hundreds or thousands of virtual machines for large workloads without straining the underlying cloud platform. The idea presented in this paper is to have all benefits of a lean Unikernel operating system while equipping it with multicore capabilities in order to represent an energy efficient and cloud-optimized operating system that can handle larger computations. IncludeOS has shown to be an extremely efficient Unikernel operating system, utilizing a much simpler event handler and foregoing the timer interrupt altogether. In our case, the experiments demonstrated increased performance for a multi-threaded processor intensive task compared to a classic operating system, thus showcasing a real-life solution for energy efficient computation in cloud environments.

Pages: 10 to 15

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: February 19, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-529-6

Location: Athens, Greece

Dates: from February 19, 2017 to February 23, 2017