Evangelia Kalyvianaki

Self-adaptive and self-configured CPU resource provisioning for virtualized servers using Kalman filters

Data center virtualization allows cost-effective server consolidation which can increase system throughput and reduce power consumption. Resource management of virtualized servers is an important and challenging task, especially when dealing with fluctuating workloads and complex multi-tier server applications. Recent results in control theory-based resource management have shown the potential benefits of adjusting allocations to match changing workloads. This paper presents a new resource management scheme that integrates the Kalman filter into feedback controllers to dynamically allocate CPU resources to virtual machines hosting server applications. The novelty of our approach is the use of the Kalman filter-the optimal filtering technique for state estimation in the sum of squares sense-to track the CPU utilizations and update the allocations accordingly. Our basic controllers continuously detect and self-adapt to unforeseen workload intensity changes. Our more advanced controller self-configures itself to any workload condition without any a priori information. Indicatively, it results in within 4.8% of the performance of workload-aware controllers under high intensity workload changes, and performs equally well under medium intensity traffic. In addition, our controllers are enhanced to deal with multi-tier server applications: by using the pair-wise resource coupling between application components, they provide a 3% on average server performance improvement when facing large unexpected workload increases when compared to controllers with no such resource-coupling mechanism. We evaluate our techniques by controlling a 3-tier Rubis benchmark web site deployed on a prototype Xen-virtualized cluster.

Software engineering meets control theory

The software engineering community has proposed numerous approaches for making software self-adaptive. These approaches take inspiration from machine learning and control theory, constructing software that monitors and modifies its own behavior to meet goals. Control theory, in particular, has received considerable attention as it represents a general methodology for creating adaptive systems. Control-theoretical software implementations, however, tend to be ad hoc. While such solutions often work in practice, it is difficult to understand and reason about the desired properties and behavior of the resulting adaptive software and its controller. This paper discusses a control design process for software systems which enables automatic analysis and synthesis of a controller that is guaranteed to have the desired properties and behavior. The paper documents the process and illustrates its use in an example that walks through all necessary steps for self-adaptive controller synthesis.

Adaptive Provisioning of Stream Processing Systems in the Cloud

With the advent of data-intensive applications that generate large volumes of real-time data, distributed stream processing systems (DSPS) become increasingly important in domains such as social networking and web analytics. In practice, DSPSs must handle highly variable workloads caused by unpredictable changes in stream rates. Cloud computing offers an elastic infrastructure that DSPSs can use to obtain resources on-demand, but an open problem is to decide on the correct resource allocation when deploying DSPSs in the cloud. This paper proposes an adaptive approach for provisioning virtual machines (VMs) for the use of a DSPS in the cloud. We initially perform a set of benchmarks across performance metrics such as network latency and jitter to explore the feasibility of cloud-based DSPS deployments. Based on these results, we propose an algorithm for VM provisioning for DSPSs that reacts to changes in the stream workload. Through a prototype implementation on Amazon EC2, we show that our approach can achieve low-latency stream processing when VMs are not overloaded, while adjusting resources dynamically with workload changes.

SQPR: Stream query planning with reuse

When users submit new queries to a distributed stream processing system (DSPS), a query planner must allocate physical resources, such as CPU cores, memory and network bandwidth, from a set of hosts to queries. Allocation decisions must provide the correct mix of resources required by queries, while achieving an efficient overall allocation to scale in the number of admitted queries. By exploiting overlap between queries and reusing partial results, a query planner can conserve resources but has to carry out more complex planning decisions. In this paper, we describe SQPR, a query planner that targets DSPSs in data centre environments with heterogeneous resources. SQPR models query admission, allocation and reuse as a single constrained optimisation problem and solves an approximate version to achieve scalability. It prevents individual resources from becoming bottlenecks by re-planning past allocation decisions and supports different allocation objectives. As our experimental evaluation in comparison with a state-of-the-art planner shows SQPR makes efficient resource allocation decisions, even with a high utilisation of resources, with acceptable overheads.

Balancing load in stream processing with the cloud

Stream processing systems must handle stream data coming from real-time, high-throughput applications, for example in financial trading. Timely processing of streams is important and requires sufficient available resources to achieve high throughput and deliver accurate results. However, static allocation of stream processing resources in terms of machines is inefficient when input streams have significant rate variations—machines remain underutilised for long periods of average load. We present a combined stream processing system that, as the input stream rate varies, adaptively balances workload between a dedicated local stream processor and a cloud stream processor. This approach only utilises cloud machines when the local stream processor becomes overloaded. We evaluate a prototype system with financial trading data. Our results show that it can adapt effectively to workload variations, while only discarding a small percentage of input data.

Adaptive Resource Provisioning for Virtualized Servers Using Kalman Filters

Resource management of virtualized servers in data centers has become a critical task, since it enables cost-effective consolidation of server applications. Resource management is an important and challenging task, especially for multitier applications with unpredictable time-varying workloads. Work in resource management using control theory has shown clear benefits of dynamically adjusting resource allocations to match fluctuating workloads. However, little work has been done toward adaptive controllers for unknown workload types. This work presents a new resource management scheme that incorporates the Kalman filter into feedback controllers to dynamically allocate CPU resources to virtual machines hosting server applications. We present a set of controllers that continuously detect and self-adapt to unforeseen workload changes. Furthermore, our most advanced controller also self-configures itself without any a priori information and with a small 4.8% performance penalty in the case of high-intensity workload changes. In addition, our controllers are enhanced to deal with multitier server applications: by using the pair-wise resource coupling between tiers, they improve server response to large workload increases as compared to controllers with no such resource-coupling mechanism. Our approaches are evaluated and their performance is illustrated on a 3-tier Rubis benchmark website deployed on a prototype Xen-virtualized cluster.

THEMIS: Fairness in Federated Stream Processing under Overload

Federated stream processing systems, which utilise nodes from multiple independent domains, can be found increasingly in multi-provider cloud deployments, internet-of-things systems, collaborative sensing applications and large-scale grid systems. To pool resources from several sites and take advantage of local processing, submitted queries are split into query fragments, which are executed collaboratively by different sites. When supporting many concurrent users, however, queries may exhaust available processing resources, thus requiring constant load shedding. Given that individual sites have autonomy over how they allocate query fragments on their nodes, it is an open challenge how to ensure global fairness on processing quality experienced by queries in a federated scenario. We describe THEMIS, a federated stream processing system for resource-starved, multi-site deployments. It executes queries in a globally fair fashion and provides users with constant feedback on the experienced processing quality for their queries. THEMIS associates stream data with its source information content (SIC), a metric that quantifies the contribution of that data towards the query result, based on the amount of source data used to generate it. We provide the BALANCE-SIC distributed load shedding algorithm that balances the SIC values of result data. Our evaluation shows that the BALANCE-SIC algorithm yields balanced SIC values across queries, as measured by Jains Fairness Index. Our approach also incurs a low execution time overhead.

Building adaptive peer-to-peer systems

Most peer-to-peer systems are built upon the assumption that their running environment is homogeneous. However, for Internet-scale applications this assumption could lead to performance limitations. We propose a framework for building peer-to-peer systems which use performance monitoring techniques to adapt to changes in their environment.

Wormhole IP over (connectionless) ATM

High-speed switches and routers internally operate using fixed-size cells or segments; variable-size packets are segmented and later reassembled. Connectionless ATM was proposed to quickly carry IP packets segmented into cells (AAL5) using a number of hardware-managed ATM VCs. We show that this is analogous to wormhole routing. We modify this architecture to make it applicable to existing ATM equipment: we propose a low-cost, single-input, single-output Wormhole IP Router that functions as a VP/VC translation filter between ATM subnetworks. When compared to IP routers, the proposed architecture features simpler hardware and lower latency. When compared to software-based IP-over-ATM techniques, the new architecture avoids the overheads of a large number of labels, or the delays of establishing new flows in software after the first few packets have suffered considerable latencies. We simulated a wormhole IP routing filter, showing that a few tens of hardware-managed VCs per outgoing VP usually suffice. We built and successfully tested a prototype, operating at 2 × 155 Mb/s, using one field programmable gate array (FPGA) and DRAM. Simple analysis shows that operation at 10 Gb/s and beyond is feasible today.

Control Strategies for Self-Adaptive Software Systems

The pervasiveness and growing complexity of software systems are challenging software engineering to design systems that can adapt their behavior to withstand unpredictable, uncertain, and continuously changing execution environments. Control theoretical adaptation mechanisms have received growing interest from the software engineering community in the last few years for their mathematical grounding, allowing formal guarantees on the behavior of the controlled systems. However, most of these mechanisms are tailored to specific applications and can hardly be generalized into broadly applicable software design and development processes. This article discusses a reference control design process, from goal identification to the verification and validation of the controlled system. A taxonomy of the main control strategies is introduced, analyzing their applicability to software adaptation for both functional and nonfunctional goals. A brief extract on how to deal with uncertainty complements the discussion. Finally, the article highlights a set of open challenges, both for the software engineering and the control theory research communities.