Title: Performance Trade-offs in Hardware and Software Approaches to Machine Virtualization Speaker: Sorav Bansal, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Date: 02/NOVEMBER/2015 Time: 5:15 PM Venue: KD102 Abstract: Virtual Machines (VMs) are the building blocks for Cloud Computing. Over the past 15 years, several approaches have evolved for virtualizing the CPU, memory, and the hardware devices. These approaches can be broadly categorized into software-only approaches and hardware-based approaches. I will start by briefly introducing the different approaches and the associated performance trade-offs, and in that context, discuss our work on virtualizing the CPU for the PowerPC [1] and the x86 architectures [2]. Drawing references from multiple other relevant papers, I will then discuss the different approaches to virtualizing memory and hardware devices, and the associated performance and manageability trade-offs. Finally, I will conclude with my perspective on the current challenges and opportunities for research in these areas. [1] Aashish Mittal, Dushyant Bansal, Sorav Bansal, Varun Sethi, "Efficient virtualization on embedded power architecture® platforms", ASPLOS 2013. [2] Piyus Kedia, Sorav Bansal, "Fast dynamic binary translation for the kernel", SOSP 2013. Speaker biography: Sorav Bansal is an Assistant Professor at the CS department in IIT Delhi, and works in the areas of programming languages and operating systems. His recent research efforts have been around redefining OS abstractions for modern computing environments, investigating superoptimization-based compiler design patterns, and improving virtualization performance. Sorav received IIT Delhi's Teaching Excellence Award for the OS course in 2012, and has received multiple research grants/awards from IBM, VMware, NetApp, and Freescale. Sorav obtained his B.Tech. from IIT Delhi, and Ph.D. from Stanford University.