Transparent computing: From concept to implementation

Summary form only given. Traditional computer systems, such as PCs, are facing several challenges, such as complex maintenance & management, low security, and less mobility. With the increasing demands for service and mobility, the computing infrastructure is looking for new technologies and practices to find solution to this problem. We proposed the concept of transparent computing, in which the software and hardware are decoupled where computation are carried out in client machines, but the storage of software, data, and status are centralized on the central servers and delivered on demand to clients in a streaming way. To implement such a system, we use two key technologies: bare-metal and asymmetric virtual machine monitor (AVMM) and Internet virtual disk. AVMM is dedicatedly designed as a light-weighted partitioning system to enable client virtualization and computation with very little virtualization overhead, especially in support of graphic-intensive applications. The Internet virtual disk whose content is stored on the server and delivered to the client as a traditional block-based hard disk interface via network is used to support back-compatibility and then enable client mobility and service. In this talk, I will start with the concept of transparent computing and then focus on the detailed designs of AVMM. Then, I will give some performance evaluation of our implemented prototype, and compare it with other similar approaches.