Real-Time Virtualization and Cloud Computing

In recent years, we have observed three major trends in the development of complex real-time embedded systems. First, to reduce cost and enhance flexibility, multiple systems are sharing common computing platforms via virtualization technology, instead of being deployed separately on physically isolated hosts. Second, multi-core processors are increasingly being used in real-time systems. Third, developers are exploring the possibilities of deploying real-time applications as virtual machines in a public cloud. The integration of real-time systems as virtual machines (VMs) atop common multi-core platforms in a public cloud raises significant new research challenges in meeting the real-time latency requirements of applications. In order to address the challenges of running real-time VMs in the cloud, we first present RT-Xen, a novel real-time scheduling framework within the popular Xen hypervisor. We start with single-core scheduling in RT-Xen, and present the first work that empirically studies and compares different real-time scheduling schemes on a same platform. We then introduce RT-Xen 2.0, which focuses on multi-core scheduling and spanning multiple design spaces, including priority schemes, server schemes, and scheduling policies. Experimental results demonstrate that when combined with compositional scheduling theory, RT-Xen can deliver real-time performance to an application running in a VM, while the default credit scheduler cannot. After that, we present RT-OpenStack, a cloud management system designed to support co-hosting real-time and non-real-time VMs in a cloud. RT-OpenStack studies the problem of running real-time VMs together with non-real-time VMs in a public cloud. Leveraging the resource interface and real-time scheduling provided by RT-Xen, RT-OpenStack provides real-time performance guarantees to real-time VMs, while achieving high resource utilization by allowing non-real-time VMs to share the remaining CPU resources through a novel VM-to-host mapping scheme. Finally, we present RTCA, a real-time communication architecture for VMs sharing a same host, which maintains low latency for high priority inter-domain communication (IDC) traffic in the face of low priority IDC traffic

Preserving the Quality of Architectural Tactics in Source Code

In any complex software system, strong interdependencies exist between requirements and software architecture. Requirements drive architectural choices while also being constrained by the existing architecture and by what is economically feasible. This makes it advisable to concurrently specify the requirements, to devise and compare alternative architectural design solutions, and ultimately to make a series of design decisions in order to satisfy each of the quality concerns. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence has shown that architectural knowledge tends to be tacit in nature, stored in the heads of people, and lost over time. Therefore, developers often lack comprehensive knowledge of underlying architectural design decisions and inadvertently degrade the quality of the architecture while performing maintenance activities. In practice, this problem can be addressed through preserving the relationships between the requirements, architectural design decisions and their implementations in the source code, and then using this information to keep developers aware of critical architectural aspects of the code. This dissertation presents a novel approach that utilizes machine learning techniques to recover and preserve the relationships between architecturally significant requirements, architectural decisions and their realizations in the implemented code. Our approach for recovering architectural decisions includes the two primary stages of training and classification. In the first stage, the classifier is trained using code snippets of different architectural decisions collected from various software systems. During this phase, the classifier learns the terms that developers typically use to implement each architectural decision. These ``indicator terms\u27\u27 represent method names, variable names, comments, or the development APIs that developers inevitably use to implement various architectural decisions. A probabilistic weight is then computed for each potential indicator term with respect to each type of architectural decision. The weight estimates how strongly an indicator term represents a specific architectural tactics/decisions. For example, a term such as \emph{pulse} is highly representative of the heartbeat tactic but occurs infrequently in the authentication. After learning the indicator terms, the classifier can compute the likelihood that any given source file implements a specific architectural decision. The classifier was evaluated through several different experiments including classical cross-validation over code snippets of 50 open source projects and on the entire source code of a large scale software system. Results showed that classifier can reliably recognize a wide range of architectural decisions. The technique introduced in this dissertation is used to develop the Archie tool suite. Archie is a plug-in for Eclipse and is designed to detect wide range of architectural design decisions in the code and to protect them from potential degradation during maintenance activities. It has several features for performing change impact analysis of architectural concerns at both the code and design level and proactively keep developers informed of underlying architectural decisions during maintenance activities. Archie is at the stage of technology transfer at the US Department of Homeland Security where it is purely used to detect and monitor security choices. Furthermore, this outcome is integrated into the Department of Homeland Security\u27s Software Assurance Market Place (SWAMP) to advance research and development of secure software systems

A Platform for Scalable Low-Latency Analytics using MapReduce

Today, the ability to process big data has become crucial to the information needs of many enterprise businesses, scientific applications, and governments. Recently, there have been increasing needs of processing data that is not only big but also fast . Here fast data refers to high-speed real-time and near real-time data streams, such as Twitter feeds, search query streams, click streams, impressions, and system logs. To handle both historical data and real-time data, many companies have to maintain multiple systems. However, recent real-world case studies show that maintaining multiple systems cause not only code duplication, but also intensive manual work to partition the analytics workloads and determine which data is processed by which system. These issues point to the need for a general, unified data processing framework to support analytical queries with different latency requirements. This thesis takes a further step towards building a general, unified system for big and fast data analytics. In order to build such a system, I propose to build on existing solutions on data parallelism and extend them with two new features: incremental processing and stream processing with latency constraints. This thesis starts with Hadoop, the most popular open-source MapReduce implementation, which provides proven scalability based on data parallelism. I answer the following questions: (1) Is Hadoop able to support incremental processing? (2) What are the necessary architecture changes in order to support incremental processing? (3) What are the additional design features needed to support stream processing with latency constraints? The thesis includes three parts that answer each of the questions. The first part of the thesis validates whether the existing MapReduce implementations can support incremental processing. Incremental processing means that computation is performed as soon as the relevant data becomes available. My extensive benchmark study of Hadoop-based MapReduce systems shows that the widely-used sort-merge implementation for partitioning and parallel processing poses a fundamental barrier to incremental computation. I further propose a cost model, and optimize the Hadoop system configuration based on the model. The benchmark results over the optimized system verify that the barrier to incremental computation is intrinsic, and cannot be removed by tuning system parameters. In the second part of the thesis, I employ various purely hash-based techniques to enable fast in-memory incremental processing in MapReduce, and frequent key based techniques to extend such processing to workloads that require memory more than available. I evaluate my Hadoop-based prototype equipped with all proposed techniques. The results show that the hash techniques allow the reduce progress to keep up with the map progress with up to 3 orders of magnitude reduction of internal disk spills, and enable results to be returned early. The third part of the thesis aims to support stream processing with latency constraints based on the incremental processing platform resulted from the second part. I perform a benchmark study to understand the sources of latency. I then propose a number of necessary architecture changes to support stream processing, and augment the platform with new latency-aware model-driven resource planning and latency-aware runtime scheduling techniques to meet user-specified latency constraints while maximizing throughput. Experiments using real-world workloads show that the techniques reduce the latency from tens or hundreds of seconds to sub-second, with 2x-5x increase in throughput. The new platform offers 1-2 orders of magnitude improvements over Storm, a commercial-grade distributed stream system, and Spark Streaming, a state-of-the-art academic prototype, when considering both latency and throughput

Resource optimization of edge servers dealing with priority-based workloads by utilizing service level objective-aware virtual rebalancing

IoT enables profitable communication between sensor/actuator devices and the cloud. Slow network causing Edge data to lack Cloud analytics hinders real-time analytics adoption. VRebalance solves priority-based workload performance for stream processing at the Edge. BO is used in VRebalance to prioritize workloads and find optimal resource configurations for efficient resource management. Apache Storm platform was used with RIoTBench IoT benchmark tool for real-time stream processing. Tools were used to evaluate VRebalance. Study shows VRebalance is more effective than traditional methods, meeting SLO targets despite system changes. VRebalance decreased SLO violation rates by almost 30% for static priority-based workloads and 52.2% for dynamic priority-based workloads compared to hill climbing algorithm. Using VRebalance decreased SLO violations by 66.1% compared to Apache Storm\u27s default allocation

Risk-averse multi-armed bandits and game theory

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) and game theory literature is mainly focused on the expected cumulative reward and the expected payoffs in a game, respectively. In contrast, the rewards and the payoffs are often random variables whose expected values only capture a vague idea of the overall distribution. The focus of this dissertation is to study the fundamental limits of the existing bandits and game theory problems in a risk-averse framework and propose new ideas that address the shortcomings. The author believes that human beings are mostly risk-averse, so studying multi-armed bandits and game theory from the point of view of risk aversion, rather than expected reward/payoff, better captures reality. In this manner, a specific class of multi-armed bandits, called explore-then-commit bandits, and stochastic games are studied in this dissertation, which are based on the notion of Risk-Averse Best Action Decision with Incomplete Information (R-ABADI, Abadi is the maiden name of the author's mother). The goal of the classical multi-armed bandits is to exploit the arm with the maximum score defined as the expected value of the arm reward. Instead, we propose a new definition of score that is derived from the joint distribution of all arm rewards and captures the reward of an arm relative to those of all other arms. We use a similar idea for games and propose a risk-averse R-ABADI equilibrium in game theory that is possibly different from the Nash equilibrium. The payoff distributions are taken into account to derive the risk-averse equilibrium, while the expected payoffs are used to find the Nash equilibrium. The fundamental properties of games, e.g. pure and mixed risk-averse R-ABADI equilibrium and strict dominance, are studied in the new framework and the results are expanded to finite-time games. Furthermore, the stochastic congestion games are studied from a risk-averse perspective and three classes of equilibria are proposed for such games. It is shown by examples that the risk-averse behavior of travelers in a stochastic congestion game can improve the price of anarchy in Pigou and Braess networks. Furthermore, the Braess paradox does not occur to the extent proposed originally when travelers are risk-averse. We also study an online affinity scheduling problem with no prior knowledge of the task arrival rates and processing rates of different task types on different servers. We propose the Blind GB-PANDAS algorithm that utilizes an exploration-exploitation scheme to load balance incoming tasks on servers in an online fashion. We prove that Blind GB-PANDAS is throughput optimal, i.e. it stabilizes the system as long as the task arrival rates are inside the capacity region. The Blind GB-PANDAS algorithm is compared to FCFS, Max-Weight, and c-mu-rule algorithms in terms of average task completion time through simulations, where the same exploration-exploitation approach as Blind GB-PANDAS is used for Max-Weight and c-$\mu$-rule. The extensive simulations show that the Blind GB-PANDAS algorithm conspicuously outperforms the three other algorithms at high loads

Hadoop MapReduce for Mobile Cloud

The new generations of mobile devices have high processing power and storage, but they lag behind in terms of software systems for big data storage and processing. Hadoop is a scalable platform that provides distributed storage and computational capabilities on clusters of commodity hardware. Building Hadoop on a mobile net- work enables the devices to run data intensive computing applications without direct knowledge of underlying distributed systems complexities. However, these applications have severe energy and reliability constraints (e.g., caused by unexpected device failures or topology changes in a dynamic network). As mobile devices are more susceptible to unauthorized access when compared to traditional servers, security is also a concern for sensitive data. Hence, it is paramount to consider reliability, energy efficiency and security for such applications. The goal of this thesis is to bring Hadoop MapReduce framework to a mobile cloud environment such that it solves these bottlenecks involved in big data processing. The Mobile Distributed File System(MDFS) addresses these issues for big data processing in mobile clouds. We have developed the Hadoop MapReduce framework over MDFS and have evaluated its performance by varying input workloads in a real heterogeneous mobile cluster. Our evaluation shows that the implementation addresses all constraints in processing large amounts of data in mobile clouds. Thus, our system is a viable solution to meet the growing demands of data processing in a mobile environment

Challenges in real-time virtualization and predictable cloud computing

Cloud computing and virtualization technology have revolutionized general-purpose computing applications in the past decade. The cloud paradigm offers advantages through reduction of operation costs, server consolidation, flexible system configuration and elastic resource provisioning. However, despite the success of cloud computing for general-purpose computing, existing cloud computing and virtualization technology face tremendous challenges in supporting emerging soft real-time applications such as online video streaming, cloud-based gaming, and telecommunication management. These applications demand real-time performance in open, shared and virtualized computing environments. This paper identifies the technical challenges in supporting real-time applications in the cloud, surveys recent advancement in real-time virtualization and cloud computing technology, and offers research directions to enable cloud-based real-time applications in the future