ORCA is a Research Line aimed at leveraging the new balance of resources to improve performance, utilization, reliability and programmability, energy and power consumption overcoming the burden imposed by the increasing complexity and the associated workload of modern computing systems.
Imagine a revolutionary computing system that can observe its own execution and optimize its behavior with respect to the external environment, the user desiderata and the applications demands. In ORCA we want to address the main challenges on the way to such a vision, that are:
- to define methods and tools to let users and developers to specify and formulate desired behaviors and goals;
- granting computing systems the ability to measure their performance and, if necessary, to quantify the gap between the specified goals and the actual behavior;
- to define, analyze and implement operating systems, virtual machines, and containers components and hardware computing architecture elements that will allow devices to modify their behavior towards the desired status.
Furthermore, time to market must be minimized, within this context the definition and the implementation of efficient and accurate runtime monitoring infrastructure to collect data on the actual performance to further improve the system after having been deployed is one of the most relevant research topics in this area.