The Beach System : Building a PC from Many Tiny Computers - A First Step at Virtualization

The emergence of tiny computers, such as smart dust, Berkeley motes and Intel motes, makes it feasible to envision the conversion of a network of tiny computers into a regular computing device (i.e., a “PC” or personal computer). While the falling cost and increasing (yet tiny) computation power of these miniature computers portend well for this vision, there are significant technical hurdles. In this paper, we take a first step at building “PCs” out of such tiny computer networks, in order to run regular PC applications. Our system, called Beach, virtualizes the memory accessed by an application at a single sensor mote (a type of tiny computer), thus enabling this memory to be distributed out over multiple such motes. By using distributed page tables and caching, we transform the puny memory at each mote (few KBs) into several KBs of memory. We present trace-driven experimental results from running regular PC applications (e.g., sorting) on top of the Beach system. Due to the exploratory nature of this research, we ignore scalability and fault-tolerance issues for now. Our work provides initial insight into the pros and cons of the vision.