6 research outputs found
Flow-time Optimization for Concurrent Open-Shop and Precedence Constrained Scheduling Models
Scheduling a set of jobs over a collection of machines is a fundamental problem that needs to be solved millions of times a day in various computing platforms: in operating systems, in large data clusters, and in data centers. Along with makespan, flow-time, which measures the length of time a job spends in a system before it completes, is arguably the most important metric to measure the performance of a scheduling algorithm. In recent years, there has been a remarkable progress in understanding flow-time based objective functions in diverse settings such as unrelated machines scheduling, broadcast scheduling, multi-dimensional scheduling, to name a few.
Yet, our understanding of the flow-time objective is limited mostly to the scenarios where jobs have no dependencies. On the other hand, in almost all real world applications, think of MapReduce settings for example, jobs have dependencies that need to be respected while making scheduling decisions. In this paper, we take first steps towards understanding this complex problem. In particular, we consider two classical scheduling problems that capture dependencies across jobs: 1) concurrent open-shop scheduling (COSSP) and 2) precedence constrained scheduling. Our main motivation to study these problems specifically comes from their relevance to two scheduling problems that have gained importance in the context of data centers: co-flow scheduling and DAG scheduling. We design almost optimal approximation algorithms for COSSP and PCSP, and show hardness results
Application-centric bandwidth allocation in datacenters
Today's datacenters host a large number of concurrently executing applications with diverse intra-datacenter latency and bandwidth requirements.
Some of these applications, such as data analytics, graph processing, and machine learning training, are data-intensive and require high bandwidth to function properly.
However, these bandwidth-hungry applications can often congest the datacenter network, leading to queuing delays that hurt application completion time.
To remove the network as a potential performance bottleneck, datacenter operators have begun deploying high-end HPC-grade networks like InfiniBand.
These networks offer fully offloaded network stacks, remote direct memory access (RDMA) capability, and non-discarding links, which allow them to provide both low latency and high bandwidth for a single application.
However, it is unclear how well such networks accommodate a mix of latency- and bandwidth-sensitive traffic in a real-world deployment.
In this thesis, we aim to answer the above question.
To do so, we develop RPerf, a latency measurement tool for RDMA-based networks that can precisely measure the InfiniBand switch latency without hardware support.
Using RPerf, we benchmark a rack-scale InfiniBand cluster in both isolated and mixed-traffic scenarios.
Our key finding is that the evaluated switch can provide either low latency or high bandwidth, but not both simultaneously in a mixed-traffic scenario.
We also evaluate several options to improve the latency-bandwidth trade-off and demonstrate that none are ideal.
We find that while queue separation is a solution to protect latency-sensitive applications, it fails to properly manage the bandwidth of other applications.
We also aim to resolve the problem with bandwidth management for non-latency-sensitive applications.
Previous efforts to address this problem have generally focused on achieving max-min fairness at the flow level.
However, we observe that different workloads exhibit varying levels of sensitivity to network bandwidth.
For some workloads, even a small reduction in available bandwidth can significantly increase completion time, while for others, completion time is largely insensitive to available network bandwidth.
As a result, simply splitting the bandwidth equally among all workloads is sub-optimal for overall application-level performance.
To address this issue, we first propose a robust methodology capable of effectively measuring the sensitivity of applications to bandwidth.
We then design Saba, an application-aware bandwidth allocation framework that distributes network bandwidth based on application-level sensitivity.
Saba combines ahead-of-time application profiling to determine bandwidth sensitivity with runtime bandwidth allocation using lightweight software support, with no modifications to network hardware or protocols.
Experiments with a 32-server hardware testbed show that Saba can significantly increase overall performance by reducing the job completion time for bandwidth-sensitive jobs
Empowering Cloud Data Centers with Network Programmability
Cloud data centers are a critical infrastructure for modern Internet services such as web search, social networking and e-commerce. However, the gradual slow-down of Moore’s law has put a burden on the growth of data centers’ performance and energy efficiency. In addition, the increasing of millisecond-scale and microsecond-scale tasks also bring higher requirements to the throughput and latency for the cloud applications. Today’s server-based solutions are hard to meet the performance requirements in many scenarios like resource management, scheduling, high-speed traffic monitoring and testing.
In this dissertation, we study these problems from a network perspective. We investigate a new architecture that leverages the programmability of new-generation network switches to improve the performance and reliability of clouds. As programmable switches only provide very limited memory and functionalities, we exploit compact data structures and deeply co-design software and hardware to best utilize the resource. More specifically, this dissertation presents four systems:
(i) NetLock: A new centralized lock management architecture that co-designs programmable switches and servers to simultaneously achieve high performance and rich policy support. It provides orders-of-magnitude higher throughput than existing systems with microsecond-level latency, and supports many commonly-used policies such as performance isolation.
(ii) HCSFQ: A scalable and practical solution to implement hierarchical fair queueing on commodity hardware at line rate. Instead of relying on a hierarchy of queues with complex queue management, HCSFQ does not keep per-flow states and uses only one queue to achieve hierarchical fair queueing.
(iii) AIFO: A new approach for programmable packet scheduling that only uses a single FIFO queue. AIFO utilizes an admission control mechanism to approximate PIFO which is theoretically ideal but hard to implement with commodity devices.
(iv) Lumina: A tool that enables fine-grained analysis of hardware network stack. By exploiting network programmability to emulate various network scenarios, Lumina is able to help users understand the micro-behaviors of hardware network stacks