A study on performance measures for auto-scaling CPU-intensive containerized applications

Autoscaling of containers can leverage performance measures from the different layers of the computational stack. This paper investigate the problem of selecting the most appropriate performance measure to activate auto-scaling actions aiming at guaranteeing QoS constraints. First, the correlation between absolute and relative usage measures and how a resource allocation decision can be influenced by them is analyzed in different workload scenarios. Absolute and relative measures could assume quite different values. The former account for the actual utilization of resources in the host system, while the latter account for the share that each container has of the resources used. Then, the performance of a variant of Kubernetes’ auto-scaling algorithm, that transparently uses the absolute usage measures to scale-in/out containers, is evaluated through a wide set of experiments. Finally, a detailed analysis of the state-of-the-art is presented

Building Cyberspace. Information, Place and Policy

Information and place have always been linked. From prehistoric forest and hydraulic expire to canal network and the networked knowledge economy, the space of flows gives rise to the way human beings perceive the world as well as to the objects they perceive. The historical relationship between information and place is important in understanding Cyberspace as a space of information that reshapes our engagement with the physical world

The Grip of History and the Scope for Novelty: Some Results and Open Questions on Path Dependence in Economic Processes

-Path dependence, irreversibility, increasing returns, learning, lock-in.

Collected Views on Complexity in Systems

The term complexity is used in many different ways in the systems domain. The different uses of this term may depend upon the kind of system being characterized, or perhaps the disciplinary perspective being brought to bear. The purpose of this paper is to gather and organize different views of complexity, as espoused by different authors. The purpose of the paper is not to make judgments among various complexity definitions, but rather to draw together the richness of various intellectual perspectives about this concept, in order to understand better how complexity relates to the concept of engineering systems. I have either quoted directly or done my best to properly paraphrase these ideas, apologizing for when I have done so incorrectly or in a misleading fashion. I hope that this paper will be useful as we begin to think through the field of engineering systems. The paper concludes with some short takes -- pungent observations on complexity by various scholars -- and some overarching questions for subsequent discussion

Low-carbon energy: a roadmap

Technologies available today, and those expected to become competitive over the next decade, will permit a rapid decarbonization of the global energy economy. New renewable energy technologies, combined with a broad suite of energy-efficiency advances, will allow global energy needs to be met without fossil fuels and by adding only minimally to the cost of energy services The world is now in the early stages of an energy revolution that over the next few decades could be as momentous as the emergence of oiland electricity-based economies a century ago. Double-digit market growth, annual capital flows of more than $100 billion, sharp declines in technology costs, and rapid progress in the sophistication and effectiveness of government policies all herald a promising new energy era. Advanced automotive, electronics, and buildings systems will allow a substantial reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, at negative costs once the savings in energy bills is accounted for. The savings from these measures can effectively pay for a significant portion of the additional cost of advanced renewable energy technologies to replace fossil fuels, including wind, solar, geothermal, and bioenergy. Resource estimates indicate that renewable energy is more abundant than all of the fossil fuels combined, and that well before mid-century it will be possible to run most national electricity systems with minimal fossil fuels and only 10 percent of the carbon emissions they produce today. The development of smart electricity grids, the integration of plug-in electric vehicles, and the addition of limited storage capacity will allow power to be provided without the baseload plants that are the foundation of today's electricity systems. Recent climate simulations conclude that CO2 emissions will need to peak within the next decade and decline by at least 50 to 80 percent by 2050. This challenge will be greatly complicated by the fact that China, India, and other developing countries are now rapidly developing modern energy systems. The only chance of slowing the buildup of CO2 concentrations soon enough to avoid catastrophic climate change that could take centuries to reverse is to transform the energy economies of industrial and developing countries almost simultaneously. This would have seemed nearly impossible a few years ago, but since then, the energy policies and markets of China and India have begun to change rapidly -- more rapidly than those in many industrial countries. Renewable and efficiency technologies will allow developing countries to increase their reliance on indigenous resources and reduce their dependence on expensive and unstable imported fuelsAround the world, new energy systems could become a huge engine of industrial development and job creation, opening vast new economic opportunities. Developing countries have the potential to "leapfrog" the carbon-intensive development path of the 20th century and go straight to the advanced energy systems that are possible today. Improved technology and high energy prices have created an extraordinarily favorable market for new energy systems over the past few years. But reaching a true economic tipping point will require innovative public policies and strong political leadership

Design choices for agent-based control of AGVs in the dough making process

In this paper we consider a multi-agent system (MAS) for the logistics control of Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) that are used in the dough making process at an industrial bakery. Here, logistics control refers to constructing robust schedules for all transportation jobs. The paper discusses how alternative MAS designs can be developed and compared using cost, frequency of messages between agents, and computation time for evaluating control rules as performance indicators. Qualitative design guidelines turn out to be insufficient to select the best agent architecture. Therefore, we also use simulation to support decision making, where we use real-life data from the bakery to evaluate several alternative designs. We find that architectures in which line agents initiate allocation of transportation jobs, and AGV agents schedule multiple jobs in advance, perform best. We conclude by discussing the benefits of our MAS systems design approach for real-life applications