During this period , the project focused on enabling the project and the targeted technologies by setting up the project management infrastructure, preparing and distributing the world’s-first 64-bit ARM based Server-on-Chip (i.e. X-Gene2 board) to the partners, demystifying its characteristics and capabilities and defining the initial interfaces at the firmware and system software between the Hypervisor and the OpenStack.
In particular, the cores and memories have already being characterised under various conditions with results for cores, caches and DRAM showing significant design margins that can be exploited within the UniServer concept. By month 18, the definition of the Hardware Exposure Interface (HEI) and the error handling procedures have been defined and implemented on the first prototype. Also, a first beta version of the HealthLog and the StressLog monitors has been implemented, while the interface between the Predictor and the other software components of the UniServer platform has been defined and started being ported on the the initial prototype.
We have also quantified the intensity of the use of hypercalls and system calls at the hypervisor level and a fault injection infrastructure which is already used to identify the invariable impact of potential faults on various structures of the system software. Our analysis show that there are necessary steps to enable intelligent, selective protection. and the sensitivity of different data structures and code modules of the hypervisor at both the user and kernel level. To this end, we have started implementing mechanisms to increase the resilience of the hypervisor against CPU faults (functionality migration of sensitive system code to reliable cores) and memory faults (support for heterogeneous reliability memory through different memory zones). Resilient mechanisms and enhanced monitoring capabilities have also been defined and enabled at the OpenStack layer. During this period, all applications have been collected and ported on the UniServer board and initial results have started being collected against metrics of success that have also been defined in this period. The project ideas and results have been published in numerous publications in top tier venues and were disseminated through two organized workshops, numerous talks, the project website and the social media channels.
