Η παρούσα διπλωματική έχει σαν σκοπό τη διερεύνηση της τεχνολογίας του Cloud Computing και της τεχνολογίας της Virtualization που την στηρίζει. Παρουσίαση της ιστορίας και μια τεχνική παρουσίαση των δυνατοτήτων και των καταβολών των τεχνολογιών. Αναφέρονται πρακτικές εφαρμογές που μπορούν οι συγκεκριμένες τεχνολογίες να εφαρμοστούν και τους σκοπούς που θα εξυπηρετήσουν. Επίσης γίνεται μια πιο αναλυτική παρουσίαση δυο προγραμμάτων (Xen Hypervisor – για το επίπεδο της Virtualization, Eucalyptus – σαν πλατφόρμα για τη δημιουργία IaaS Clouds). Παρουσιάζονται επίσης σύντομοι οδηγοί για την εγκατάσταση ενός Cloud, καθώς και το configuration μαζί με τους λόγους που χρησιμοποιήθηκε. / The scope of this thesis is to study the technology of Cloud Computing and the Virtualization technology that is supporting it. A presentation of the history, a technical overview and the origins of these technologies. There are mentioned some fields that the specified technologies could apply and the purposes that they would serve. On the third chapter, a more detailed presentation of two pieces of software is given (Xen Hypervisor – for the Virtualization Layer, Eucalyptus – as the platform to create IaaS Clouds). In the end quick how-to guides are described on the procedure to install a Cloud, the configuration and the reasons of the specific set up as well.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has been adopted by a large number of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), e.g. foursquare, Monster World, and Netflix, to provide various kinds of services. There has been some existing work in the current literature investigating the variation and unpredictability of cloud services. These work demonstrated interesting observations regarding cloud offerings. However, they failed to reveal the underlying essence of the various appearances for the cloud services. In this thesis, we looked into the underlying scheduling mechanisms, and hardware configurations, of Amazon EC2, and investigated their impact on the performance of virtual machine instances running atop. Specifically, several instances with the standard and high-CPU instance families are covered to shed light on the hardware upgrade and replacement of Amazon EC2. Then large instance from the standard family is selected to conduct focus analysis. To better understand the various behaviors of the instances, a local cluster environment is set up, which consists of two Intel Xeon servers, using different scheduling algorithms. Through a series of benchmark measurements, we observed the following findings: (1) Amazon utilizes highly diversified hardware to provision different instances. It results in significant performance variation, which can reach up to 30%. (2) Two different scheduling mechanisms were observed, one is similar to Simple Earliest Deadline Fist (SEDF) scheduler, whilst the other one analogies Credit scheduler in Xen hypervisor. These two scheduling mechanisms also arouse variations in performance. (3) By applying a simple "trial-and-failure" instance selection strategy, the cost saving is surprisingly significant. Given certain distribution of fast-instances and slow-instances, the achievable cost saving can reach 30%, which is attractive to SMEs which use Amazon EC2 platform. / Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) har antagits av ett stort antal små och medelstora företag (SMB), t.ex. foursquare, Monster World, och Netflix, för att ge olika typer av tjänster. Det finns en del tidigare arbeten i den aktuella litteraturen som undersöker variationen och oförutsägbarheten av molntjänster. Dessa arbetenhar visat intressanta iakttagelser om molnerbjudanden, men de har misslyckats med att avslöja den underliggande kärnan hos de olika utseendena för molntjänster. I denna avhandling tittade vi på de underliggande schemaläggningsmekanismerna och maskinvarukonfigurationer i Amazon EC2, och undersökte deras inverkan på resultatet för de virtuella maskiners instanser som körs ovanpå. Närmare bestämt är det flera fall med standard- och hög-CPU instanser som omfattas att belysa uppgradering av hårdvara och utbyte av Amazon EC2. Stora instanser från standardfamiljen är valda för att genomföra en fokusanalys. För att bättre förstå olika beteenden av de olika instanserna har lokala kluster miljöer inrättas, dessa klustermiljöer består av två Intel Xeonservrar och har inrättats med hjälp av olika schemaläggningsalgoritmer. Genom en serie benchmarkmätningar observerade vi följande slutsatser: (1) Amazon använder mycket diversifierad hårdvara för att tillhandahållandet olika instanser. Från de olika instans-sub-typernas perspektiv leder hårdvarumångfald till betydande prestationsvariation som kan nå upp till 30%. (2) Två olika schemaläggningsmekanismer observerades, en liknande Simple Earliest Deadline Fist(SEDF) schemaläggare, medan den andra mer liknar Credit-schemaläggaren i Xenhypervisor. Dessa två schemaläggningsmekanismer ger även upphov till variationer i prestanda. (3) Genom att tillämpa en enkel "trial-and-failure" strategi för val av instans, är kostnadsbesparande förvånansvärt stor. Med tanke på fördelning av snabba och långsamma instanser kan kostnadsbesparingen uppgå till 30%, vilket är attraktivt för små och medelstora företag som använder Amazon EC2 plattform.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-12T20:22:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marcelo Pereira da Silva.pdf: 1790996 bytes, checksum: 8b61245ad63935d86a70520f22eae9bc (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-07-03 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / With the ever-increasing dependence on computers and networks, many systems are required to be continuously available in order to fulfill their mission. Virtualization technology enables high availability to be offered in a convenient, cost-effective manner: with the encapsulation provided by virtual machines (VMs), entire systems can be replicated transparently in software, obviating the need for expensive fault-tolerant hardware. Remus is a VM replication mechanism for the Xen hypervisor that provides high availability despite crash failures. Replication is performed by checkpointing the VM at fixed intervals. However, there is an antagonism between processing and communication regarding the optimal checkpointing interval: while longer intervals benefit processorintensive applications, shorter intervals favor network-intensive applications. Thus, any chosen interval may not always be suitable for the hosted applications, limiting Remus usage in many scenarios. This work introduces Adaptive Remus, a proposal for adaptive checkpointing in Remus that dynamically adjusts the replication frequency according to the characteristics of running applications. Experimental results indicate that our proposal improves performance for applications that require both processing and communication, without harming applications that use only one type of resource. / Com a dependência cada vez maior de computadores e redes, muitos sistemas precisam estar continuamente disponíveis para cumprir sua missão. A tecnologia de virtualização permite prover alta disponibilidade de forma conveniente e a um custo razoável: com o encapsulamento oferecido pelas máquinas virtuais (MVs), sistemas inteiros podem ser replicados em software, de forma transparente, eliminando a necessidade de hardware tolerante a faltas dispendioso. Remus é um mecanismo de replicação de MVs que fornece alta disponibilidade diante de faltas de parada. A replicação é realizada através de checkpointing, seguindo um intervalo fixo de tempo predeterminado. Todavia, existe um antagonismo entre processamento e comunicação em relação ao intervalo ideal entre checkpoints: enquanto intervalos maiores beneficiam aplicações com processamento intensivo, intervalos menores favorecem as aplicações cujo desempenho é dominado pela rede. Logo, o intervalo utilizado nem sempre é o adequado para as características de uso de recursos da aplicação em execução na MV, limitando a aplicabilidade de Remus em determinados cenários. Este trabalho apresenta Adaptive Remus, uma proposta de checkpointing adaptativo para Remus, que ajusta dinamicamente a frequência de replicação de acordo com as características das aplicações em execução. Os resultados indicam que a proposta obtém um melhor desempenho de aplicações que utilizam tanto recursos de processamento como de comunicação, sem prejudicar aplicações que usam apenas um dos tipos de recursos.

Malware detection and analysis is a major part of computer security. There is an arm race between security experts and malware developers to develop various techniques to secure computer systems and to find ways to circumvent these security methods. In recent years process heap-based attacks have increased significantly. These attacks exploit the system under attack via the heap, typically by using a heap spraying attack. The main drawback with existing techniques is that they either consume too many resources or are complicated to implement. Our work in this thesis focuses on new methods which offloads process heap analysis for guest Virtual Machines (VM) to the privileged domain using Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) in a Cloud environment. VMI provides us with a seamless, non-intrusive and invisible (to malwares) way of observing the memory and state of VMs without raising red flags for the malwares.

The extraembryonic endoderm of mammals is essential for nutritive support of the foetus and patterning of the early embryo. Visceral and parietal endoderm are major subtypes of this lineage with the former exhibiting most, if not all, of the embryonic patterning properties. Extraembryonic endoderm (XEN) cell lines derived from the primitive endoderm of mouse blastocysts represent a cell culture model of this lineage, but are biased towards parietal endoderm in culture and in chimaeras. Here, I further characterise XEN cells and show that these cell lines exhibit high levels of heterogeneity. In an effort for XEN cells to adopt visceral endoderm character different aspects of the in vivo environment were mimicked. I found that BMP4 and laminin promote a mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition of XEN cells with upregulation of epithelial markers and downregulation of mesenchymal markers. Gene expression analysis showed the differentiated XEN cells most resembled extraembryonic visceral endoderm. Correspondingly, inhibition of Erk and BMP signalling drives XEN cells toward parietal endoderm fate. Finally, I show that BMP4 treatment of freshly isolated parietal endoderm from Reichert’s membrane promotes its visceral endoderm differentiation. This suggests that parietal endoderm is still developmentally plastic and can be transdifferentiated to a visceral endoderm in response to BMP. Generation of visceral endoderm from XEN cells uncovers the true potential of these blastocyst-derived cells and is a significant step towards modelling early developmental events ex vivo.

<p>This thesis presents an evaluation of the Solaris version of the Xen virtual machine monitor and a comparison of its performance to the performance of Solaris Containers under similar conditions. Xen is a virtual machine monitor, based on the paravirtualization approach, which provides an instruction set different to the native machine environment and therefore requires modifications to the guest operating systems. Solaris Zones is an operating system-level virtualization technology that is part of the Solaris OS. Furthermore, we provide a basic performance evaluation of the security modules for Xen and Zones, known as sHype and Solaris Trusted Extensions, respectively.</p><p>We evaluate the control domain (know as Domain-0) and the user domain performance as the number of user domains increases. Testing Domain-0 with an increasing number of user domains allows us to evaluate how much overhead virtual operating systems impose in the idle state and how their number influences the overall system performance. Testing one user domain and increasing the number of idle domains allows us to evaluate how the number of domains influences operating system performance. Testing concurrently loaded increasing numbers of user domains we investigate total system efficiency and load balancing dependent on the number of running systems.</p><p>System performance was limited by CPU, memory, and hard drive characteristics. In the case of CPU-bound tests Xen exhibited performance close to the performance of Zones and to the native Solaris performance, loosing 2-3% due to the virtualization overhead. In case of memory-bound and hard drive-bound tests Xen showed 5 to 10 times worse performance.</p>

The extraembryonic endoderm (XEN) defines the yolk sac, a set of membranes that provide essential support for mammalian embryos. Recently, the committed XENprecursor was identified in the embryonic Inner Cell Mass (ICM) as a group of cells that intermingles with the closely related, anatomically indistinguishable epiblast (EPI)- precursor that gives rise to the fetus. In vitro, the EPI-precursor is represented by the well-known embryonic stem (ES) cell lines, but cell lines representing the XENprecursor are not known. Furthermore, since the XEN-precursor cells were discovered only very recently, the unexpected fact that they express the key pluripotency marker Oct4 has not been explored. Recently, however, our laboratory has isolated rat XEN cell lines that express Oct4, leading to the following two questions: (i) Do these new XEN cell lines represent XEN-precursor cells? (ii) Is their Oct4 expression regulated similarly as previously known from ES cells? These two questions are addressed here by lineage marker and reporter gene analyses. Whole culture analyses showed that rat XEN cell lines expressed markers of all XEN stages including XEN-precursor, primitive endoderm (PrE) and/or visceral endoderm (VE), and parietal endoderm (PE) but trophoectoderm and EPI-precursor markers were missing. In line with this, immunocytochemistry demonstrated heterogeneity and directly visualized the XEN-precursor, PrE/VE, and PE subpopulations. Low-density plating and time-dependent immunocytochemistry on resulting colonies strongly suggested that XEN-precursor cells generate the other XEN stages. Moreover, by analyzing single-cell derived clones, it was shown that culture heterogeneity results from the self-renewal and differentiation of a single cell. Reporter gene analyses using the 5’ regulatory region of the mouse Oct4 gene revealed that a DNA fragment containing the previously described distal enhancer drove reporter gene expression only in ES cells whereas inclusion of an upstream fragment led to high expression in both mouse ES and rat XEN cells. In conclusion, our rat XEN cell lines contain XEN-precursor cells that differentiate extensively, providing for the first time an in vitro model that mimics the natural process of early XEN differentiation. In addition, they regulate Oct4 gene transcription differently than ES cells suggesting heterogeneous Oct4 regulation within the mammalian ICM.

The performance of modern many-core systems depends on the effective use of their complex cache and memory structures, and this will likely become more pronounced with the impending arrival of on-chip 3D stacked and non-volatile off-chip byte-addressable memory. Yet to date, operating systems have not treated memory as a first class schedulable resource, embracing memory heterogeneity. This dissertation presents a new software abstraction, called ‘memory region’, which denotes the current set of physical memory pages actively used by workloads. Using this abstraction, memory resources can be scheduled for applications to fully exploit a platform's underlying cache and memory system, thereby gaining improved performance and predictability in execution, particularly for the consolidated workloads seen in virtualized and cloud computing infrastructures. The abstraction's implementation in the Xen hypervisor involves the run-time detection of memory regions, the scheduled mapping of these regions to caches to match performance goals, and maintaining region-to-cache mappings using per-cache page tables. This dissertation makes the following specific contributions. First, its region scheduling method proposes that the location of memory blocks rather than CPU utilization is the principal determinant where workloads are run. It proposes a new scheduling method, the region scheduling that the location of memory blocks determines where the workloads are run. Second, treating memory blocks as first-class resources, new methods for efficient cache management are shown to improve application performance as well as the performance of certain operating system functions. Third, explicit memory scheduling makes it possible to disaggregate operating systems, without the need to change OS sources and with only small markups of target guest OS functionality. With this method, OS functions can be mapped to specific desired platform components, such as file system confined to running on specific cores and using only certain memory resources designated for its use. This can improve performance for applications heavily dependent on certain OS functions, by dynamically providing those functions with the resources needed for their current use, and it can prevent performance-critical application functionality from being needlessly perturbed by OS functions used for other purposes or by other jobs. Fourth, extensions of region scheduling can also help applications deal with the heterogeneous memory resources present in future systems, including on-chip stacked DRAM and NUMA or even NVRAM memory modules. More generally, regions scheduling is shown to apply to memory structures with well-defined differences in memory access latencies.

Nowadays, Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) are becoming larger and implement more complex functions. Therefore, technologies that are currently used to implement these functions, like hardware platforms and communication protocols might soon become unusable due to the lack of resources. The industry is trying to adopt new technologies that will allow these functionalities to be developed without an increase in the size of the equipment, or of the development costs. To enumerate some of these technologies: virtualization, multi-core technologies are the ones that show the biggest potential. Because these technologies are not mature, research has to be done in order to fully maximize their potential. Another technology that is highly used by the industry is the Ethernet communication protocol. It presents some advantages, but due to the non-real-time nature of the applications that it was designed for, it has to be extended in order to be used in real-time applications. The objective of this thesis work is to model an Ethernet network comprised of software partitions so that it can provide timing guarantees for the traffic that traverses the network. A Response Time Analysis for real-time flows over such networks is proposed. The model and the RTA are evaluated by experiments.

Nominally, one can expect any user of modern technology to at least carry a handheld device of the class of an iPAQ (perhaps in the form of a cellphone). The availability of technology in the environment (home, office, public spaces) also continues to grow at an amazing pace. With advances in technology, it is feasible to remain connected and enjoy services that we care about, be it entertainment, sports, or plain work, anytime anywhere. We need a system that supports seamless migration of services from handhelds to the environment (or vice versa) and between environments. Virtualization technology is able to support such a migration by providing a common virtualized interface on both source and destination. In this dissertation, we focus on two levels of virtualization to address issues for seamless mobility. We first identify three different kinds of spaces and three axes to support mobility in these spaces. Then we present two systems that address these dimensions from different perspectives. For middleware level virtualization, we built a system called MobiGo that can capture the application states and restore the service execution with saved states at the destination platform. It provides the architectural elements for efficiently managing different states in the different spaces. Evaluation suggested that the overhead of the system is relatively small and meets user's expectation. On the other hand, for device level virtualization, Chameleon is a Xen-like system level virtualization system to support device level migration and automatic capability adaptation at a lower level. Chameleon is able to capture and restore device states and automatically accommodate the heterogeneity of devices to provide the migration of services. Device level virtualization can address some issues that cannot be addressed in middleware level virtualization. It also has less requirements than middleware level virtualization in order to be applied to existing systems. Through performance measurements, we demonstrate that Chameleon introduces minimal overhead while providing capability adaptation and device state migration for seamless mobility in ubiquitous computing environments.