Labeled von Neumann Architecture for Software-Defined Cloud

As cloud computing is moving forward rapidly, cloud providers have been encountering great challenges:long tail latency, low utilization, and high interference. They intend to co-locate multiple workloads on a single server to improve the resource utilization. But the co-located applications suffer from severe performance interference and long tail latency, which lead to unpredictable user experience. To meet these challenges, software-defined cloud has been proposed to facilitate tighter coordination among application, operating system and hardware. Users' quality of service (QoS) requirements could be propagated all the way down to the hardware with differential management mechanisms. However, there is little hardware support to maintain and guarantee users' QoS requirements. To this end, this paper proposes Labeled von Neumann Architecture (LvNA), which introduces a labelling mechanism to convey more software's semantic information such as QoS and security to the underlying hardware. LvNA is able to correlate labels with various entities, e.g., virtual machine, process and thread, and propagate labels in the whole machine and program differentiated services based on rules. We consider LvNA to be a fundamental hardware support to the software-defined cloud.