Joint Data Purchasing and Data Placement in a Geo-Distributed Data Market

This paper studies design challenges faced by a geo-distributed cloud data market: which data to purchase (data purchasing) and where to place/replicate the data (data placement). We show that the joint problem of data purchasing and data placement within a cloud data market is NP-hard in general. However, we give a provably optimal algorithm for the case of a data market made up of a single data center, and then generalize the structure from the single data center setting and propose Datum, a near-optimal, polynomial-time algorithm for a geo-distributed data market

Distributed Optimization and Data Market Design

We consider algorithms for distributed optimization and their applications. In this thesis, we propose a new approach for distributed optimization based on an emerging area of theoretical computer science – local computation algorithms. The approach is fundamentally different from existing methodologies and provides a number of benefits, such as robustness to link failure and adaptivity to dynamic settings. Specifically, we develop an algorithm, LOCO, that given a convex optimization problem P with n variables and a “sparse” linear constraint matrix with m constraints, provably finds a solution as good as that of the best online algorithm for P using only O(log(n + m)) messages with high probability. The approach is not iterative and communication is restricted to a localized neighborhood. In addition to analytic results, we show numerically that the performance improvements over classical approaches for distributed optimization are significant, e.g., it uses orders of magnitude less communication than ADMM. We also consider the operations of a geographically distributed cloud data market. We consider design decisions that include which data to purchase (data purchasing) and where to place or replicate the data for delivery (data placement). We show that a joint approach to data purchasing and data placement within a cloud data market improves operating costs. This problem can be viewed as a facility location problem, and is thus NP-hard. However, we give a provably optimal algorithm for the case of a data market consisting of a single data center, and then generalize the result from the single data center setting in order to develop a near-optimal, polynomial-time algorithm for a geo-distributed data market. The resulting design, Datum, decomposes the joint purchasing and placement problem into two subproblems, one for data purchasing and one for data placement, using a transformation of the underlying bandwidth costs. We show, via a case study, that Datum is near-optimal (within 1.6%) in practical settings.</p

STEER AND HEIFER PRICE DIFFERENCES IN THE LIVE CATTLE AND CARCASS MARKETS

A dynamic model is used to estimate quarterly price differences between steers and heifers in the feeder, slaughter, and carcass markets. For cattle within the same weight and grade range, their price differences are hypothesized to be influenced by seasonal, economic, and partly reflecting time changes in evaluation of steer and heifer quality in the live cattle and dressed meat trades. Stochastic factors are less prevalent at the feeder level, although risk of placing pregnant heifers in feedlots and weather are important. Steer and heifer inventories, slaughter prices, cost of gain, and margins explained most of the variation in feeder steer and heifer price differences.Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing,

Optimizing Resource Management in Cloud Analytics Services

The fundamental challenge in the cloud today is how to build and optimize machine learning and data analytical services. Machine learning and data analytical platforms are changing computing infrastructure from expensive private data centers to easily accessible online services. These services pack user requests as jobs and run them on thousands of machines in parallel in geo-distributed clusters. The scale and the complexity of emerging jobs lead to increasing challenges for the clusters at all levels, from power infrastructure to system architecture and corresponding software framework design. These challenges come in many forms. Today's clusters are built on commodity hardware and hardware failures are unavoidable. Resource competition, network congestion, and mixed generations of hardware make the hardware environment complex and hard to model and predict. Such heterogeneity becomes a crucial roadblock for efficient parallelization on both the task level and job level. Another challenge comes from the increasing complexity of the applications. For example, machine learning services run jobs made up of multiple tasks with complex dependency structures. This complexity leads to difficulties in framework designs. The scale, especially when services span geo-distributed clusters, leads to another important hurdle for cluster design. Challenges also come from the power infrastructure. Power infrastructure is very expensive and accounts for more than 20% of the total costs to build a cluster. Power sharing optimization to maximize the facility utilization and smooth peak hour usages is another roadblock for cluster design. In this thesis, we focus on solutions for these challenges at the task level, on the job level, with respect to the geo-distributed data cloud design and for power management in colocation data centers. At the task level, a crucial hurdle to achieving predictable performance is stragglers, i.e., tasks that take significantly longer than expected to run. At this point, speculative execution has been widely adopted to mitigate the impact of stragglers in simple workloads. We apply straggler mitigation for approximation jobs for the first time. We present GRASS, which carefully uses speculation to mitigate the impact of stragglers in approximation jobs. GRASS's design is based on the analysis of a model we develop to capture the optimal speculation levels for approximation jobs. Evaluations with production workloads from Facebook and Microsoft Bing in an EC2 cluster of 200 nodes show that GRASS increases accuracy of deadline-bound jobs by 47% and speeds up error-bound jobs by 38%. Moving from task level to job level, task level speculation mechanisms are designed and operated independently of job scheduling when, in fact, scheduling a speculative copy of a task has a direct impact on the resources available for other jobs. Thus, we present Hopper, a job-level speculation-aware scheduler that integrates the tradeoffs associated with speculation into job scheduling decisions based on a model generalized from the task-level speculation model. We implement both centralized and decentralized prototypes of the Hopper scheduler and show that 50% (66%) improvements over state-of-the-art centralized (decentralized) schedulers and speculation strategies can be achieved through the coordination of scheduling and speculation. As computing resources move from local clusters to geo-distributed cloud services, we are expecting the same transformation for data storage. We study two crucial pieces of a geo-distributed data cloud system: data acquisition and data placement. Starting from developing the optimal algorithm for the case of a data cloud made up of a single data center, we propose a near-optimal, polynomial-time algorithm for a geo-distributed data cloud in general. We show, via a case study, that the resulting design, Datum, is near-optimal (within 1.6%) in practical settings. Efficient power management is a fundamental challenge for data centers when providing reliable services. Power oversubscription in data centers is very common and may occasionally trigger an emergency when the aggregate power demand exceeds the capacity. We study power capping solutions for handling such emergencies in a colocation data center, where the operator supplies power to multiple tenants. We propose a novel market mechanism based on supply function bidding, called COOP, to financially incentivize and coordinate tenants' power reduction for minimizing total performance loss while satisfying multiple power capping constraints. We demonstrate that COOP is "win-win", increasing the operator's profit (through oversubscription) and reducing tenants' costs (through financial compensation for their power reduction during emergencies).</p

Universal Broadband: Targeting Investments to Deliver Broadband Services to All Americans

Suggests ways to implement Knight's 2009 recommendation for universal broadband access, including repurposing and distributing existing funds via a transparent, market-based approach and supporting adoption by low-income and other non-adopter communities