The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

The Center for Education and Research in
Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

MicroVM: Micro Virtual Machines for Managed Languages — Abstraction, contained

Research Areas: End System Security

Principal Investigator: Antony Hosking

A large fraction of today’s software is written in managed languages. These languages increase software productivity by offering rich abstractions for managing memory, executing code concurrently, and hiding the complexity of modern hardware. Examples include JavaScript, PHP, Objective-C, Java, C#, Python, and Ruby. These languages are economically important. Unfortunately, most of these languages are inefficient, imposing overheads as large as a factor of fifty compared to orthodox language choices such as C.

The project will define, develop, evaluate, and refine the essential components of a new foundation layer for managed language implementation. In doing so, it will address a key source of systemic inefficiency, by pioneering the micro virtual machine (μVM) as an efficient high-performance substrate for managed language implementation. The relationship between a μVM and existing managed language implementations is analogous to the one between an operating system micro kernel and monolithic operating systems such as Linux. A μVM captures the insight that there exists a well-defined foundation common to most modern languages that can take responsibility for fundamental abstractions over hardware, concurrency, and memory. By isolating and exposing this substrate, a μVM embodies state-of-the-art base technology available to language implementers while isolating them from the pernicious complexities of these abstractions, freeing them to focus on all-important language-specific optimizations. This project will enable more efficient, reliable, and verifiable software, and a distinctly sharper focus for language implementation research and development.

Personnel

Other PIs: Eliot Moss, UMass Amherst Steve Blackburn, Australian National University Michael Norrish, Data61

Representative Publications

Keywords: assurance, Java, JavaScript, Python, runtime systems, software systems, verification