Towards Hybrid Isolation for Shared Multicore Systems

Co-locating and running multiple applications on a multicore system is inevitable for data centers to achieve high resource efficiency. However, it causes performance degradation due to the contention for shared resources, such as cache and memory bandwidth. Several approaches use software or hardware isolation techniques to mitigate resource contentions. Nevertheless, the existing approaches have not fully exploited differences in isolation techniques by the characteristics of applications to maximize the performance. Software techniques bring more flexibility than hardware ones in terms of performance while sacrificing strictness and responsiveness. In contrast, hardware techniques provide more strict and faster isolations compared to software ones. In this paper, we illustrate the trade-offs between software and hardware isolation techniques and also show the benefit of coordinated enforcement of multiple isolation techniques. Also, we propose HIS, a hybrid isolation system that dynamically uses either the software or hardware isolation technique. Our preliminary results show that HIS can improve the performance of foreground applications by from 1.7–2.14\(\times \) compared with static isolations for the selected benchmarks.