Measuring and Managing Answer Quality for Online Data-Intensive Services

Online data-intensive services parallelize query execution across distributed software components. Interactive response time is a priority, so online query executions return answers without waiting for slow running components to finish. However, data from these slow components could lead to better answers. We propose Ubora, an approach to measure the effect of slow running components on the quality of answers. Ubora randomly samples online queries and executes them twice. The first execution elides data from slow components and provides fast online answers; the second execution waits for all components to complete. Ubora uses memoization to speed up mature executions by replaying network messages exchanged between components. Our systems-level implementation works for a wide range of platforms, including Hadoop/Yarn, Apache Lucene, the EasyRec Recommendation Engine, and the OpenEphyra question answering system. Ubora computes answer quality much faster than competing approaches that do not use memoization. With Ubora, we show that answer quality can and should be used to guide online admission control. Our adaptive controller processed 37% more queries than a competing controller guided by the rate of timeouts.Comment: Technical Repor

Information fusion architectures for security and resource management in cyber physical systems

Data acquisition through sensors is very crucial in determining the operability of the observed physical entity. Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) are an example of distributed systems where sensors embedded into the physical system are used in sensing and data acquisition. CPSs are a collaboration between the physical and the computational cyber components. The control decisions sent back to the actuators on the physical components from the computational cyber components closes the feedback loop of the CPS. Since, this feedback is solely based on the data collected through the embedded sensors, information acquisition from the data plays an extremely vital role in determining the operational stability of the CPS. Data collection process may be hindered by disturbances such as system faults, noise and security attacks. Hence, simple data acquisition techniques will not suffice as accurate system representation cannot be obtained. Therefore, more powerful methods of inferring information from collected data such as Information Fusion have to be used. Information fusion is analogous to the cognitive process used by humans to integrate data continuously from their senses to make inferences about their environment. Data from the sensors is combined using techniques drawn from several disciplines such as Adaptive Filtering, Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition. Decisions made from such combination of data form the crux of information fusion and differentiates it from a flat structured data aggregation. In this dissertation, multi-layered information fusion models are used to develop automated decision making architectures to service security and resource management requirements in Cyber Physical Systems --Abstract, page iv

Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters

Efficiently scheduling data processing jobs on distributed compute clusters requires complex algorithms. Current systems, however, use simple generalized heuristics and ignore workload characteristics, since developing and tuning a scheduling policy for each workload is infeasible. In this paper, we show that modern machine learning techniques can generate highly-efficient policies automatically. Decima uses reinforcement learning (RL) and neural networks to learn workload-specific scheduling algorithms without any human instruction beyond a high-level objective such as minimizing average job completion time. Off-the-shelf RL techniques, however, cannot handle the complexity and scale of the scheduling problem. To build Decima, we had to develop new representations for jobs' dependency graphs, design scalable RL models, and invent RL training methods for dealing with continuous stochastic job arrivals. Our prototype integration with Spark on a 25-node cluster shows that Decima improves the average job completion time over hand-tuned scheduling heuristics by at least 21%, achieving up to 2x improvement during periods of high cluster load

Joint QoS-Aware Scheduling and Precoding for Massive MIMO Systems via Deep Reinforcement Learning

The rapid development of mobile networks proliferates the demands of high data rate, low latency, and high-reliability applications for the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond (B5G) mobile networks. Concurrently, the massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology is essential to realize the vision and requires coordination with resource management functions for high user experiences. Though conventional cross-layer adaptation algorithms have been developed to schedule and allocate network resources, the complexity of resulting rules is high with diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements and B5G features. In this work, we consider a joint user scheduling, antenna allocation, and precoding problem in a massive MIMO system. Instead of directly assigning resources, such as the number of antennas, the allocation process is transformed into a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based dynamic algorithm selection problem for efficient Markov decision process (MDP) modeling and policy training. Specifically, the proposed utility function integrates QoS requirements and constraints toward a long-term system-wide objective that matches the MDP return. The componentized action structure with action embedding further incorporates the resource management process into the model. Simulations show 7.2% and 12.5% more satisfied users against static algorithm selection and related works under demanding scenarios

Deep Learning Empowered Task Offloading for Mobile Edge Computing in Urban Informatics

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Led by industrialization of smart cities, numerous interconnected mobile devices, and novel applications have emerged in the urban environment, providing great opportunities to realize industrial automation. In this context, autonomous driving is an attractive issue, which leverages large amounts of sensory information for smart navigation while posing intensive computation demands on resource constrained vehicles. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a potential solution to alleviate the heavy burden on the devices. However, varying states of multiple edge servers as well as a variety of vehicular offloading modes make efficient task offloading a challenge. To cope with this challenge, we adopt a deep Q-learning approach for designing optimal offloading schemes, jointly considering selection of target server and determination of data transmission mode. Furthermore, we propose an efficient redundant offloading