Mage: Online Interference-Aware Scheduling in Multi-Scale Heterogeneous Systems

Heterogeneity has grown in popularity both at the core and server level as a way to improve both performance and energy efficiency. However, despite these benefits, scheduling applications in heterogeneous machines remains challenging. Additionally, when these heterogeneous resources accommodate multiple applications to increase utilization, resources are prone to contention, destructive interference, and unpredictable performance. Existing solutions examine heterogeneity either across or within a server, leading to missed performance and efficiency opportunities. We present Mage, a practical interference-aware runtime that optimizes performance and efficiency in systems with intra- and inter-server heterogeneity. Mage leverages fast and online data mining to quickly explore the space of application placements, and determine the one that minimizes destructive interference between co-resident applications. Mage continuously monitors the performance of active applications, and, upon detecting QoS violations, it determines whether alternative placements would prove more beneficial, taking into account any overheads from migration. Across 350 application mixes on a heterogeneous CMP, Mage improves performance by 38% and up to 2x compared to a greedy scheduler. Across 160 mixes on a heterogeneous cluster, Mage improves performance by 30% on average and up to 52% over the greedy scheduler, and by 11% over the combination of Paragon [15] for inter- and intra-server heterogeneity

Hipster: hybrid task manager for latency-critical cloud workloads

In 2013, U. S. data centers accounted for 2.2% of the country's total electricity consumption, a figure that is projected to increase rapidly over the next decade. Many important workloads are interactive, and they demand strict levels of quality-of-service (QoS) to meet user expectations, making it challenging to reduce power consumption due to increasing performance demands. This paper introduces Hipster, a technique that combines heuristics and reinforcement learning to manage latency-critical workloads. Hipster's goal is to improve resource efficiency in data centers while respecting the QoS of the latency-critical workloads. Hipster achieves its goal by exploring heterogeneous multi-cores and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). To improve data center utilization and make best usage of the available resources, Hipster can dynamically assign remaining cores to batch workloads without violating the QoS constraints for the latency-critical workloads. We perform experiments using a 64-bit ARM big.LITTLE platform, and show that, compared to prior work, Hipster improves the QoS guarantee for Web-Search from 80% to 96%, and for Memcached from 92% to 99%, while reducing the energy consumption by up to 18%.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

D-SPACE4Cloud: A Design Tool for Big Data Applications

The last years have seen a steep rise in data generation worldwide, with the development and widespread adoption of several software projects targeting the Big Data paradigm. Many companies currently engage in Big Data analytics as part of their core business activities, nonetheless there are no tools and techniques to support the design of the underlying hardware configuration backing such systems. In particular, the focus in this report is set on Cloud deployed clusters, which represent a cost-effective alternative to on premises installations. We propose a novel tool implementing a battery of optimization and prediction techniques integrated so as to efficiently assess several alternative resource configurations, in order to determine the minimum cost cluster deployment satisfying QoS constraints. Further, the experimental campaign conducted on real systems shows the validity and relevance of the proposed method