Replication-based Cyber Foraging and Automated Configuration Management.

Mobile Service;Cyber Foraging;Configuration Management;Speculative Execution;Automated Software Configuration Testing;Computer Science;Engineering;Computer Science & Engineering

Su, Ya-YunnScott, Clayton D. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Mobile Service;    Cyber Foraging;    Configuration Management;    Speculative Execution;    Automated Software Configuration Testing;    Computer Science;    Engineering;    Computer Science & Engineering;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/62372/yysu_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This thesis addresses two research problems.The first problem is howto run demanding applications on mobile computers.Mobile computers,such as smart phones and personal digital assistants, have recentlybecome more prevalent.However, the size of these mobile computersconstrain the processing power, battery capacity, and memory they cancarry.Therefore, it is difficult to run resource-intensiveapplications on these computers.This thesis explores utilizing publicly-available compute servers,which we call surrogates, to augment mobile computers to remotelyexecute resource-intensive applications.I built a software systemnamed Slingshot to demonstrate this concept.Slingshot replicatesapplication state on surrogates and the user;;s home machine byencapsulating the application state in a virtual machine.The replicaon the surrogate provides good response time as it is co-located withthe mobile computer, and the replica on the home machine can providedata safety if a surrogate fails.The second problem this thesis addresses is how to make configurationmanagement easier for users.Software applications provide manyconfiguration options that allow users to customizing them.However,software applications depend on shared libraries and configurationdata and interact with other software applications through variouscommunication channels.Such complex software dependencies make itdifficult to configure software applications correctly.I built a software system named AutoBash to automate manyconfiguration management tasks for users, such as troubleshootingmisconfigurations and running regression tests.AutoBashautomatically finds a solution that transforms the system into ahealthy state by using a set of predicates that test the system stateto verify each solution.AutoBash leverages OS-level speculativeexecution to try many solutions and causal information tracking toreduce the time to run regression tests.To reduce the user-effort required to write predicates in AutoBash,this thesis explores automatically generating predicates by observingthe actions of ordinary users fixing configuration problems.The mainresults were that: (1) my method can infer predicates for allconfiguration bugs studied with very few false positives, (2) themajority is usually right, so using multiple traces can improveresults.