Trustworthy Systems

Towards automatic optimisation of componentised systems

Authors

Nicholas Fitzroy-Dale and Ihor Kuz

NICTA

UNSW

Abstract

Use of hardware-based memory protection to implement a componentised system is an effective way to enforce isolation between untrusted software components. Unfortunately this type of system design can lead to poor performance. Manual optimisation is error-prone and difficult. Instead, we describe a system to perform automatic optimisation of components, relying on three major functional units: a method to reconfigure the component system, simulations of each component in order to determine performance characteristics, and a system simulator that makes use of those characteristics to construct a ranking of optimisations. We start with a simple model and iteratively expand it until it is suitable for a wide variety of performance-measurement scenarios, and show that a small amount of information provided with each component allows for a wide variety of optimisation checks, such as scheduling, threading, and cache performance. We present our initial results with this system and discuss a number of interesting extensions.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{FitzroyDale_Kuz_09,
    address          = {Nuremberg, Germany},
    author           = {Fitzroy-Dale, Nicholas and Kuz, Ihor},
    booktitle        = {Workshop on Isolation and Integration in Embedded Systems},
    editor           = {{Michael Engel}},
    month            = mar,
    pages            = {6},
    paperurl         = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_full_text/1696.pdf},
    title            = {Towards automatic optimisation of componentised systems},
    year             = {2009}
  }

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