@techreport{TD:100114,
	att_abstract={{A basic building block of cloud computing is virtualization. Virtual machines
(VMs) encapsulate a users computing environment and efficiently isolate it from
that of other users. VMs, however, are large entities, and no clear APIs exist
yet that allow users to efficiently and programatically control them.

We present SnowFlock, a paradigm and system for cloud computing that introduces VM cloning
as a first-class cloud abstraction. VM cloning exploits the well-understood
and effective semantics of UNIX fork. We demonstrate multiple usage models
of VM cloning: users can incorporate the primitive in their code, can wrap around existing 
toolchains via scripting, can encapsulate the API within a parallel programming framework,
or can use it to load-balance and self-scale clustered servers.

VM cloning needs to be efficient to be usable. It must efficiently transmit 
VM state in order to avoid cloud IO bottlenecks. We demonstrate how the semantics
of cloning aid us in realizing its efficiency: state is propagated in parallel to multiple
VM clones, and is transmitted during runtime, allowing for optimizations that 
substantially reduce the IO load. We show detailed microbenchmark results highlighting the
effciency of our optimizations, and macrobenchmark numbers demonstrating the
effectiveness of the different usage models of SnowFlock.}},
	att_authors={hl143p},
	att_categories={C_NSS.11},
	att_copyright={{ACM}},
	att_copyright_notice={{(c) ACM, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems {{, 2010-12-31}}}},
	att_donotupload={},
	att_private={false},
	att_projects={},
	att_tags={Virtualization,  Cloud Computing},
	att_techdoc={true},
	att_techdoc_key={TD:100114},
	att_url={http://web1.research.att.com:81/techdocs_downloads/TD:100114_DS1_2010-10-28T14:46:37.120Z.pdf},
	author={Horacio Lagar-cavilla and Joseph Whitney and Roy Bryant and Philip Patchin and Michael Brudno and Eyal de Lara and Stephen M. Rumble and M. Satyanarayanan and Adin Scannell},
	institution={{ACM Transactions on Computer Systems}},
	month={December},
	title={{SnowFlock: Virtual Machine Cloning as a First Class Cloud Primitive}},
	year=2010,
}