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arXiv · 2408.05251

Columbo: Low Level End-to-End System Traces through Modular Full-System Simulation

Jakob Görgen·Vaastav Anand·Hejing Li·Jialin Li·Antoine Kaufmann
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Abstract

Fully understanding performance is a growing challenge when building next-generation cloud systems. Often these systems build on next-generation hardware, and evaluation in realistic physical testbeds is out of reach. Even when physical testbeds are available, visibility into essential system aspects is a challenge in modern systems where system performance depends on often sub-$μs$ interactions between HW and SW components. Existing tools such as performance counters, logging, and distributed tracing provide aggregate or sampled information, but remain insufficient for understanding individual requests in-depth. In this paper, we explore a fundamentally different approach to enable in-depth understanding of cloud system behavior at the software and hardware level, with (almost) arbitrarily fine-grained visibility. Our proposal is to run cloud systems in detailed full-system simulations, configure the simulators to collect detailed events without affecting the system, and finally assemble these events into end-to-end system traces that can be analyzed by existing distributed tracing tools.

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Jakob Görgen, Vaastav Anand, Hejing Li, Jialin Li, Antoine Kaufmann. 2024-08-08. Columbo: Low Level End-to-End System Traces through Modular Full-System Simulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05251

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