Archer: A Community Distributed Computing Infrastructure for Computer Architecture Research and Education

TL;DR

Archer is a community-driven distributed computing platform that leverages virtualization and batch scheduling to provide high-throughput resources for computer architecture research and education across wide-area networks.

Contribution

It introduces a middleware-based infrastructure that seamlessly aggregates distributed resources for research and educational purposes in computer architecture.

Findings

Prototype deployment demonstrates effective workload execution.

Middleware enables seamless resource integration across wide-area networks.

Performance analysis shows Archer supports high-throughput computing.

Abstract

This paper introduces Archer, a community-based computing resource for computer architecture research and education. The Archer infrastructure integrates virtualization and batch scheduling middleware to deliver high-throughput computing resources aggregated from resources distributed across wide-area networks and owned by different participating entities in a seamless manner. The paper discusses the motivations leading to the design of Archer, describes its core middleware components, and presents an analysis of the functionality and performance of a prototype wide-area deployment running a representative computer architecture simulation workload.