CMU-CS-08-158
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University



CMU-CS-08-158

Improving the Deployability of Diamond

Adam Wolbach

September 2008

Masters Thesis

CMU-CS-08-158.pdf


Keywords: Virtual machines, mobile computing, nomadic computing, pervasive computing, transient use, VirtualBox, VMM, performance, Diamond, OpenDiamond®, discard-based search, content-based search, metadata scoping

This document describes three engineering contributions made to Diamond, a system for discard-based search, to improve its portability and maintainability, and add new functionality. First, core engineering work on Diamond's RPC and content management subsystems improves the system's maintainability. Secondly, a new mechanism supports "scoping" a Diamond search through the use of external metadata sources. Scoping selects a subset of objects to perform content-based search on by executing a query on an external metadata source related to the data. After query execution, the scope is set for all subsequent searches performed by Diamond applications. The final contribution is Kimberley, a system that enables mobile application use by leveraging virtual machine technology. Kimberley separates application state from a base virtual machine by differencing the VM before and after application customization. The much smaller application state can be carried with the user and quickly applied in a mobile setting to provision infrastructure hardware. Experiments confirm that the startup and teardown delays experienced by a Kimberley user are acceptable for mobile usage scenarios.

78 pages


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