MORPHOSYS: efficient colocation of QoS-constrained workloads in the cloud

In hosting environments such as IaaS clouds, desirable application performance is usually guaranteed through the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which specify minimal fractions of resource capacities that must be allocated for use for proper operation. Arbitrary colocation of applications with different SLAs on a single host may result in inefficient utilization of the host’s resources. In this paper, we propose that periodic resource allocation and consumption models be used for a more granular expression of SLAs. Our proposed SLA model has the salient feature that it exposes flexibilities that enable the IaaS provider to safely transform SLAs from one form to another for the purpose of achieving more efficient colocation. Towards that goal, we present MorphoSys: a framework for a service that allows the manipulation of SLAs to enable efficient colocation of workloads. We present results from extensive trace-driven simulations of colocated Video-on-Demand servers in a cloud setting. The results show that potentially-significant reduction in wasted resources (by as much as 60%) are possible using MorphoSys.First author draf

DCCast: Efficient Point to Multipoint Transfers Across Datacenters

Using multiple datacenters allows for higher availability, load balancing and reduced latency to customers of cloud services. To distribute multiple copies of data, cloud providers depend on inter-datacenter WANs that ought to be used efficiently considering their limited capacity and the ever-increasing data demands. In this paper, we focus on applications that transfer objects from one datacenter to several datacenters over dedicated inter-datacenter networks. We present DCCast, a centralized Point to Multi-Point (P2MP) algorithm that uses forwarding trees to efficiently deliver an object from a source datacenter to required destination datacenters. With low computational overhead, DCCast selects forwarding trees that minimize bandwidth usage and balance load across all links. With simulation experiments on Google's GScale network, we show that DCCast can reduce total bandwidth usage and tail Transfer Completion Times (TCT) by up to $50\%$ compared to delivering the same objects via independent point-to-point (P2P) transfers.Comment: 9th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud17/program/presentation/noormohammadpou

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

BRAHMA : an intelligent framework for automated scaling of streaming and deadline-critical workflows

The prevalent use of multi-component, multi-tenant models for building novel Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications has resulted in wide-spread research on automatic scaling of the resultant complex application workflows. In this paper, we propose a holistic solution to Automatic Workflow Scaling under the combined presence of Streaming and Deadline-critical workflows, called AWS-SD. To solve the AWS-SD problem, we propose a framework BRAHMA, that learns workflow behavior to build a knowledge-base and leverages this info to perform intelligent automated scaling decisions. We propose and evaluate different resource provisioning algorithms through CloudSim. Our results on time-varying workloads show that the proposed algorithms are effective and produce good cost-quality trade-offs while preventing deadline violations. Empirically, the proposed hybrid algorithm combining learning and monitoring, is able to restrict deadline violations to a small fraction (3-5%), while only suffering a marginal increase in average cost per component of 1-2% over our baseline naive algorithm, which provides the least costly provisioning but suffers from a large number (35-45%) of deadline violations

A Game-theoretic Framework for Revenue Sharing in Edge-Cloud Computing System

We introduce a game-theoretic framework to ex- plore revenue sharing in an Edge-Cloud computing system, in which computing service providers at the edge of the Internet (edge providers) and computing service providers at the cloud (cloud providers) co-exist and collectively provide computing resources to clients (e.g., end users or applications) at the edge. Different from traditional cloud computing, the providers in an Edge-Cloud system are independent and self-interested. To achieve high system-level efficiency, the manager of the system adopts a task distribution mechanism to maximize the total revenue received from clients and also adopts a revenue sharing mechanism to split the received revenue among computing servers (and hence service providers). Under those system-level mechanisms, service providers attempt to game with the system in order to maximize their own utilities, by strategically allocating their resources (e.g., computing servers). Our framework models the competition among the providers in an Edge-Cloud system as a non-cooperative game. Our simulations and experiments on an emulation system have shown the existence of Nash equilibrium in such a game. We find that revenue sharing mechanisms have a significant impact on the system-level efficiency at Nash equilibria, and surprisingly the revenue sharing mechanism based directly on actual contributions can result in significantly worse system efficiency than Shapley value sharing mechanism and Ortmann proportional sharing mechanism. Our framework provides an effective economics approach to understanding and designing efficient Edge-Cloud computing systems

Performance optimization and energy efficiency of big-data computing workflows

Next-generation e-science is producing colossal amounts of data, now frequently termed as Big Data, on the order of terabyte at present and petabyte or even exabyte in the predictable future. These scientific applications typically feature data-intensive workflows comprised of moldable parallel computing jobs, such as MapReduce, with intricate inter-job dependencies. The granularity of task partitioning in each moldable job of such big data workflows has a significant impact on workflow completion time, energy consumption, and financial cost if executed in clouds, which remains largely unexplored. This dissertation conducts an in-depth investigation into the properties of moldable jobs and provides an experiment-based validation of the performance model where the total workload of a moldable job increases along with the degree of parallelism. Furthermore, this dissertation conducts rigorous research on workflow execution dynamics in resource sharing environments and explores the interactions between workflow mapping and task scheduling on various computing platforms. A workflow optimization architecture is developed to seamlessly integrate three interrelated technical components, i.e., resource allocation, job mapping, and task scheduling. Cloud computing provides a cost-effective computing platform for big data workflows where moldable parallel computing models are widely applied to meet stringent performance requirements. Based on the moldable parallel computing performance model, a big-data workflow mapping model is constructed and a workflow mapping problem is formulated to minimize workflow makespan under a budget constraint in public clouds. This dissertation shows this problem to be strongly NP-complete and designs i) a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for a special case with a pipeline-structured workflow executed on virtual machines of a single class, and ii) a heuristic for a generalized problem with an arbitrary directed acyclic graph-structured workflow executed on virtual machines of multiple classes. The performance superiority of the proposed solution is illustrated by extensive simulation-based results in Hadoop/YARN in comparison with existing workflow mapping models and algorithms. Considering that large-scale workflows for big data analytics have become a main consumer of energy in data centers, this dissertation also delves into the problem of static workflow mapping to minimize the dynamic energy consumption of a workflow request under a deadline constraint in Hadoop clusters, which is shown to be strongly NP-hard. A fully polynomial-time approximation scheme is designed for a special case with a pipeline-structured workflow on a homogeneous cluster and a heuristic is designed for the generalized problem with an arbitrary directed acyclic graph-structured workflow on a heterogeneous cluster. This problem is further extended to a dynamic version with deadline-constrained MapReduce workflows to minimize dynamic energy consumption in Hadoop clusters. This dissertation proposes a semi-dynamic online scheduling algorithm based on adaptive task partitioning to reduce dynamic energy consumption while meeting performance requirements from a global perspective, and also develops corresponding system modules for algorithm implementation in the Hadoop ecosystem. The performance superiority of the proposed solutions in terms of dynamic energy saving and deadline missing rate is illustrated by extensive simulation results in comparison with existing algorithms, and further validated through real-life workflow implementation and experiments using the Oozie workflow engine in Hadoop/YARN systems

Towards An Efficient Cloud Computing System: Data Management, Resource Allocation and Job Scheduling

Cloud computing is an emerging technology in distributed computing, and it has proved to be an effective infrastructure to provide services to users. Cloud is developing day by day and faces many challenges. One of challenges is to build cost-effective data management system that can ensure high data availability while maintaining consistency. Another challenge in cloud is efficient resource allocation which ensures high resource utilization and high SLO availability. Scheduling, referring to a set of policies to control the order of the work to be performed by a computer system, for high throughput is another challenge. In this dissertation, we study how to manage data and improve data availability while reducing cost (i.e., consistency maintenance cost and storage cost); how to efficiently manage the resource for processing jobs and increase the resource utilization with high SLO availability; how to design an efficient scheduling algorithm which provides high throughput, low overhead while satisfying the demands on completion time of jobs. Replication is a common approach to enhance data availability in cloud storage systems. Previously proposed replication schemes cannot effectively handle both correlated and non-correlated machine failures while increasing the data availability with the limited resource. The schemes for correlated machine failures must create a constant number of replicas for each data object, which neglects diverse data popularities and cannot utilize the resource to maximize the expected data availability. Also, the previous schemes neglect the consistency maintenance cost and the storage cost caused by replication. It is critical for cloud providers to maximize data availability hence minimize SLA (Service Level Agreement) violations while minimize cost caused by replication in order to maximize the revenue. In this dissertation, we build a nonlinear programming model to maximize data availability in both types of failures and minimize the cost caused by replication. Based on the model\u27s solution for the replication degree of each data object, we propose a low-cost multi-failure resilient replication scheme (MRR). MRR can effectively handle both correlated and non-correlated machine failures, considers data popularities to enhance data availability, and also tries to minimize consistency maintenance and storage cost. In current cloud, providers still need to reserve resources to allow users to scale on demand. The capacity offered by cloud offerings is in the form of pre-defined virtual machine (VM) configurations. This incurs resource wastage and results in low resource utilization when the users actually consume much less resource than the VM capacity. Existing works either reallocate the unused resources with no Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for availability\footnote{Availability refers to the probability of an allocated resource being remain operational and accessible during the validity of the contract~\cite{CarvalhoCirne14}.} or consider SLOs to reallocate the unused resources for long-running service jobs. This approach increases the allocated resource whenever it detects that SLO is violated in order to achieve SLO in the long term, neglecting the frequent fluctuations of jobs\u27 resource requirements in real-time application especially for short-term jobs that require fast responses and decision making for resource allocation. Thus, this approach cannot fully utilize the resources to process data because they cannot quickly adjust the resource allocation strategy dealing with the fluctuations of jobs\u27 resource requirements. What\u27s more, the previous opportunistic based resource allocation approach aims at providing long-term availability SLOs with good QoS for long-running jobs, which ensures that the jobs can be finished within weeks or months by providing slighted degraded resources with moderate availability guarantees, but it ignores deadline constraints in defining Quality of Service (QoS) for short-lived jobs requiring online responses in real-time application, thus it cannot truly guarantee the QoS and long-term availability SLOs. To overcome the drawbacks of previous works, we adequately consider the fluctuations of unused resource caused by bursts of jobs\u27 resource demands, and present a cooperative opportunistic resource provisioning (CORP) scheme to dynamically allocate the resource to jobs. CORP leverages complementarity of jobs\u27 requirements on different resource types and utilizes the job packing to reduce the resource wastage and increase the resource utilization. An increasing number of large-scale data analytics frameworks move towards larger degrees of parallelism aiming at high throughput. Scheduling that assigns tasks to workers and preemption that suspends low-priority tasks and runs high-priority tasks are two important functions in such frameworks. There are many existing works on scheduling and preemption in literature to provide high throughput. However, previous works do not substantially consider dependency in increasing throughput in scheduling or preemption. Considering dependency is crucial to increase the overall throughput. Besides, extensive task evictions for preemption increase context switches, which may decrease the throughput. To address the above problems, we propose an efficient scheduling system Dependency-aware Scheduling and Preemption (DSP) to achieve high throughput in scheduling and preemption. First, we build a mathematical model to minimize the makespan with the consideration of task dependency, and derive the target workers for tasks which can minimize the makespan; second, we utilize task dependency information to determine tasks\u27 priorities for preemption; finally, we present a probabilistic based preemption to reduce the numerous preemptions, while satisfying the demands on completion time of jobs. We conduct trace driven simulations on a real-cluster and real-world experiments on Amazon S3/EC2 to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed system in comparison with other systems. The experimental results show the superior performance of our proposed system. In the future, we will further consider data update frequency to reduce consistency maintenance cost, and we will consider the effects of node joining and node leaving. Also we will consider energy consumption of machines and design an optimal replication scheme to improve data availability while saving power. For resource allocation, we will consider using the greedy approach for deep learning to reduce the computation overhead caused by the deep neural network. Also, we will additionally consider the heterogeneity of jobs (i.e., short jobs and long jobs), and use a hybrid resource allocation strategy to provide SLO availability customization for different job types while increasing the resource utilization. For scheduling, we will aim to handle scheduling tasks with partial dependency, worker failures in scheduling and make our DSP fully distributed to increase its scalability. Finally, we plan to use different workloads and real-world experiment to fully test the performance of our methods and make our preliminary system design more mature