Multi-capacity bin packing with dependent items and its application to the packing of brokered workloads in virtualized environments

Providing resource allocation with performance predictability guarantees is increasingly important in cloud platforms, especially for data-intensive applications, in which performance depends greatly on the available rates of data transfer between the various computing/storage hosts underlying the virtualized resources assigned to the application. Existing resource allocation solutions either assume that applications manage their data transfer between their virtualized resources, or that cloud providers manage their internal networking resources. With the increased prevalence of brokerage services in cloud platforms, there is a need for resource allocation solutions that provides predictability guarantees in settings, in which neither application scheduling nor cloud provider resources can be managed/controlled by the broker. This paper addresses this problem, as we define the Network-Constrained Packing (NCP) problem of finding the optimal mapping of brokered resources to applications with guaranteed performance predictability. We prove that NCP is NP-hard, and we define two special instances of the problem, for which exact solutions can be found efficiently. We develop a greedy heuristic to solve the general instance of the NCP problem , and we evaluate its efficiency using simulations on various application workloads, and network models.This work was done while author was at Boston University. It was partially supported by NSF CISE awards #1430145, #1414119, #1239021 and #1012798. (1430145 - NSF CISE; 1414119 - NSF CISE; 1239021 - NSF CISE; 1012798 - NSF CISE

Network-constrained packing of brokered workloads in virtualized environments

Providing resource allocation with performance predictability guarantees is increasingly important in cloud platforms, especially for data-intensive applications, in which performance depends greatly on the available rates of data transfer between the various computing/storage hosts underlying the virtualized resources assigned to the application. Existing resource allocation solutions either assume that applications manage their data transfer between their virtualized resources, or that cloud providers manage their internal networking resources.With the increased prevalence of brokerage services in cloud platforms, there is a need for resource allocation solutions that provides predictability guarantees in settings, in which neither application scheduling nor cloud provider resources can be managed/controlled by the broker. This paper addresses this problem, as we define the Network-Constrained Packing (NCP)problem of finding the optimal mapping of brokered resources to applications with guaranteed performance predictability. We prove that NCP is NP-hard, and we define two special instances of the problem, for which exact solutions can be found efficiently. We develop a greedy heuristic to solve the general instance of the NCP problem, and we evaluate its efficiency using simulations on various application workloads, and network models.This work is supported by NSF CISE CNS Award #1347522, # 1239021, # 1012798

A Switch Architecture for Real-Time Multimedia Communications

In this paper we present a switch that can be used to transfer multimedia type of trafJic. The switch provides a guaranteed throughput and a bounded latency. We focus on the design of a prototype Switching Element using the new technology opportunities being offered today. The architecture meets the multimedia requirements but still has a low complexity and needs a minimum amount of hardware. A main item of this paper will be the background of the architectural design decisions made. These include the interconnection topology, buffer organization, routing and scheduling. The implementation of the switching fabric with FPGAs, allows us to experiment with switching mode, routing strategy and scheduling policy in a multimedia environment. The witching elements are interconnected in a Kautz topology. Kautz graphs have interesting properties such as: a small diametec the degree is independent of the network size, the network is fault-tolerant and has a simple routing algorithm

Design of a Hybrid Modular Switch

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) shed new light for the design, deployment, and management of cloud networks. Many network functions such as firewalls, load balancers, and intrusion detection systems can be virtualized by servers. However, network operators often have to sacrifice programmability in order to achieve high throughput, especially at networks' edge where complex network functions are required. Here, we design, implement, and evaluate Hybrid Modular Switch (HyMoS). The hybrid hardware/software switch is designed to meet requirements for modern-day NFV applications in providing high-throughput, with a high degree of programmability. HyMoS utilizes P4-compatible Network Interface Cards (NICs), PCI Express interface and CPU to act as line cards, switch fabric, and fabric controller respectively. In our implementation of HyMos, PCI Express interface is turned into a non-blocking switch fabric with a throughput of hundreds of Gigabits per second. Compared to existing NFV infrastructure, HyMoS offers modularity in hardware and software as well as a higher degree of programmability by supporting a superset of P4 language

A Fast Compiler for NetKAT

High-level programming languages play a key role in a growing number of networking platforms, streamlining application development and enabling precise formal reasoning about network behavior. Unfortunately, current compilers only handle "local" programs that specify behavior in terms of hop-by-hop forwarding behavior, or modest extensions such as simple paths. To encode richer "global" behaviors, programmers must add extra state -- something that is tricky to get right and makes programs harder to write and maintain. Making matters worse, existing compilers can take tens of minutes to generate the forwarding state for the network, even on relatively small inputs. This forces programmers to waste time working around performance issues or even revert to using hardware-level APIs. This paper presents a new compiler for the NetKAT language that handles rich features including regular paths and virtual networks, and yet is several orders of magnitude faster than previous compilers. The compiler uses symbolic automata to calculate the extra state needed to implement "global" programs, and an intermediate representation based on binary decision diagrams to dramatically improve performance. We describe the design and implementation of three essential compiler stages: from virtual programs (which specify behavior in terms of virtual topologies) to global programs (which specify network-wide behavior in terms of physical topologies), from global programs to local programs (which specify behavior in terms of single-switch behavior), and from local programs to hardware-level forwarding tables. We present results from experiments on real-world benchmarks that quantify performance in terms of compilation time and forwarding table size

Performance Evaluation of Microservices Architectures using Containers

Microservices architecture has started a new trend for application development for a number of reasons: (1) to reduce complexity by using tiny services; (2) to scale, remove and deploy parts of the system easily; (3) to improve flexibility to use different frameworks and tools; (4) to increase the overall scalability; and (5) to improve the resilience of the system. Containers have empowered the usage of microservices architectures by being lightweight, providing fast start-up times, and having a low overhead. Containers can be used to develop applications based on monolithic architectures where the whole system runs inside a single container or inside a microservices architecture where one or few processes run inside the containers. Two models can be used to implement a microservices architecture using containers: master-slave, or nested-container. The goal of this work is to compare the performance of CPU and network running benchmarks in the two aforementioned models of microservices architecture hence provide a benchmark analysis guidance for system designers.Comment: Submitted to the 14th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA15). Partially funded by European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 639595) - HiEST Projec