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

This paper introduces Archer, a community-based computing infrastructure supporting computer architecture research and education. The Archer system builds on virtualization techniques to provide a collaborative environment that facilitates sharing of computational resources and data among users. It integrates batch scheduling middleware to deliver high-throughput computing services aggregated from resources distributed across wide-area networks and owned by different participating entities in a seamless manner. The paper discusses the motivations that have led to the design of Archer, describes its core middleware components, and presents an analysis of the functionality and performance of the first wide-area deployment of Archer running a representative computer architecture simulation workload.