PhD Proposal: Cloud Computing: Algorithms and Applications

Talk
Sheng Yang
Time: 
01.23.2019 10:30 to 12:30
Location: 

AVW 3258

The proliferation of datacenters to handle the rapidly growing amount of data being managed in the cloud, necessitates the design, management and effective utilization of the thousands of machines that constitute a data center. Many modern big data applications require access to a large number of machines and data sets for training neural nets or for other processing.In this proposal, we present research challenges and progress along two fronts.The first challenge addresses the need to schedule communication between the machines in a much more effective manner, as several running applications compete for network bandwidth. We address a basic question known as coflow scheduling to optimize the average completion time of tasks that are running across different machines in the data center and to effectively handle their communication needs. In addition, we also study a related model that addresses communication needs of tasks that process data on multiple data centers and handles communication requirements of such tasks across a wide area network with possibly widely varying bandwidth across different pairs of machines.The second challenge is from the user perspective - since access to resources such as those provided by Amazon AWS can be expensive at scale, cloud computing providers often sell under utilized resources at a significant discount via a spot instance market. However, these instances are not dedicated and while they offer a cheaper alternative, there is a chance that the user’s job will be interrupted to process higher priority tasks. Certain non-critical applications are not significantly impacted by delays due to interruptions, and we develop an initial framework to study some basic scheduling questions.In all of these topics, the problems we study are NP-hard and our focus is on developing good approximation algorithms. In addition, our work has shown that the algorithms developed in this framework are practical and efficient and can be easily deployed in practice.

Examining Committee:

Chair: Dr. Samir Khuller Dept. rep: Dr. Neil Spring Members: Dr. Aravind Srinivasan Dr. Mosharaf Chowdhury