Toward a Unified Framework for the Heterogeneous Cloud Utilizing Bytecode Containers

Abstract

As we approach the limits of Moore’s law the Cloud computing landscape is becoming ever more heterogeneous in order to extract more performance from available resources. Meanwhile, the container-based cloud is of growing importance as a lightweight way to deploy applications. A unified heterogeneous systems framework for use with container-based applications in the heterogeneous cloud is required. We present a bytecode-based framework and it’s implementation called Man O’ War, which allows for the creation of novel, portable LLVM bitcode-based containers for use in the heterogeneous cloud. Containers in Man O’ War enabled systems can be efficiently specialized for the available hardware within the Cloud and expand the frontiers for optimization in heterogeneous cloud environments. We demonstrate that a framework utilizing portable bytecode-based containers eases optimizations such as heterogeneous scaling which have the potential to improve resource utilization and significantly lower costs for users of the public cloud.