This is the homepage of the Xen repeated research project at Clarkson University. The project was formed by a group of graduate students taking a topics course in operating systems. The group selected a semester long project with the hopes of reproducing the research results related to the the Xen virtual machine monitor. This page contains links to the scripts written for the repeated research, as well as links to new test cases used to evaluate Xen.
Xen is an extremely interesting piece of software developed at the University of Cambridge. We are indebted very much to the persons there for providing this software, and assisting us in repeating their research.
For the purposes of our research we needed to implement an open source, and inexpensive, tool for measuring web server performance in the spirit of the SPECweb99 tool. SPECweb99 is available for a resonable purchase fee by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). The tool we developed in house resulted from a need to drill down into the various components of measuring web performance easily. We wanted to be able to parameterize the ammount of network traffic, disk I/O, and cpu work being done. With that capability we could systematically look at web server performance as a function of its fundamental components.