News

Cox, Rixner win funding develop I/O virtualization solution

Alan Cox

Scott Rixner

September 25, 2007 – Associate professors Alan Cox and Scott Rixner have received a three-year, $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new network virtualization architecture that combines software and hardware to provide an efficient, general and manageable solution to input/output virtualization.

Virtualization technology enables the consolidation of resources so that one computer or server may act as many. For many organizations, it’s becoming an increasingly appealing solution to managing mounting volumes of data, growing demands on resources and rising energy costs.

Currently, virtualization systems for commodity hardware, such as VMWare and Xen, virtualize processor, memory and input/output (I/O) devices in software. While this enables these systems to support a wide range of hardware, it comes at a significant performance cost, especially for networking and other I/O operations.

Cox and Rixner have developed a new input/output virtualization architecture, called concurrent, direct network access or CDNA, that combines software and hardware components to reduce the performance cost of network virtualization. The architecture provides untrusted virtual machines safe, direct access to the network interface and dramatically improves the efficiency of I/O virtualization. However, a notable gap between native and virtualized I/O performance still exists.

Using this grant, Cox and Rixner will seek to eliminate this performance gap without sacrificing the generality and manageability of software-based I/O virtualization.

“In recent years, the number of virtual servers deployed has increased at an incredible rate,” Cox said. “Our work’s impact on the deployment of these virtual servers will be to reduce the number of physical machines required to host them. By increasing the efficiency of virtualized I/O, a greater number of virtual servers can be hosted by a single physical machine, further increasing the savings from virtualization. This technology would save billions of dollars in energy costs and millions of pounds in the release of carbon emissions.”

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