NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: Enabling Application-Level Performance Predictability in Public Clouds

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

State-of-the-art resource sharing mechanisms in today's datacenters and compute clouds are agnostic to application-level performance requirements, resulting in unpredictable performance. This is especially true for the network. Unlike, CPU, memory, or disk, cloud operators do not provide any guarantees for the network. Many tenants rely on over-provisioning and static allocation for performance isolation, which results in low utilization and increased cost and environmental impacts. This project aims to build a set of solutions to achieve short- and long-term performance predictability with high resource utilization. The goal is to enable coexisting applications from different tenants to meet a variety of performance objectives including obtaining timely responses and minimizing variance of successive responses, while adhering to organizational hierarchies of individual tenants. The key technical challenges in this project include developing short- and long-term resource allocation algorithms, accurate demand estimation, as well as fast and efficient enforcement, all of which are compounded by the multi-resource and shared nature of the network. Two key techniques guide the proposed work: (i) temporal scheduling ensures predictable performance through short- and long-term performance isolation, and (ii) spatial placement ensures higher utilization through initial placement and periodic migration of tenants' virtual machines. Predictable, efficient data analytics will have significant socio-economic ramifications. It will also enable mission-critical applications, e.g., anomaly detection, fraud protection, autonomous vehicles, and robotics-- that require a highly consistent and reliable level of performance to coexist with the less sensitive ones. Algorithms and software from the project will be incorporated into existing open-source big data stacks for public reuse. By leveraging ongoing relationships with the industry, artifacts from this project will be converted from research into practice in a fast manner. The project has significant educational and outreach components, which include introducing new courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels based on the outcomes of this project as well as arranging cloud computing boot camps aimed at students from high schools and involving women and under-represented minorities.