DistriBit: a distributed dynamic binary translator system for thin client computing

Abstract

Although dynamic binary translators (DBT) are gaining popularity in the modern virtual execution environments (VEE), the requirement of DBTs' processing and memory resources has seriously hampered the performance of host platform. In this paper, we propose a distributed DBT system--DistriBit for resource-limited thin clients to overcome these challenges. Since thin client always has small memory and cannot cache all translated code, we divide its unified cache into a 2-level cache and design a dual locality cache management scheme to help thin client manage its translated code. Meanwhile, to improve the execution efficiency of thin client and reduce the overhead of network transmission, we not only optimize translated code on the server but also predict those thin client required code with a prediction scheme. Experimental results show that our DistriBit system could effectively improve a thin client's performance of SPECint2000 by 2%~26% relative to a monolithic thin client, and our dual locality cache management scheme that results in miss reduction of about 1.41%~20.6% for a thin client with a 2-level cache over a thin client with a unified cache.