S Souvik Dhara

Optimal Service Elasticity in Large-Scale Distributed Systems

A fundamental challenge in large-scale cloud networks and data centers is to achieve highly efficient server utilization and limit energy consumption, while providing excellent user-perceived performance in the presence of uncertain and time-varying demand patterns. Auto-scaling provides a popular paradigm for automatically adjusting service capacity in response to demand while meeting performance targets, and queue-driven auto-scaling techniques have been widely investigated in the literature. In typical data center architectures and cloud environments however, no centralized queue is maintained, and load balancing algorithms immediately distribute incoming tasks among parallel queues. In these distributed settings with vast numbers of servers, centralized queue-driven auto-scaling techniques involve a substantial communication overhead and major implementation burden, or may not even be viable at all. Motivated by the above issues, we propose a joint auto-scaling and load balancing scheme which does not require any global queue length information or explicit knowledge of system parameters, and yet provides provably near-optimal service elasticity. We establish the fluid-level dynamics for the proposed scheme in a regime where the total traffic volume and nominal service capacity grow large in proportion. The fluid-limit results show that the proposed scheme achieves asymptotic optimality in terms of user-perceived delay performance as well as energy consumption. Specifically, we prove that both the waiting time of tasks and the relative energy portion consumed by idle servers vanish in the limit. At the same time, the proposed scheme operates in a distributed fashion and involves only constant communication overhead per task, thus ensuring scalability in massive data center operations. Extensive simulation experiments corroborate the fluid-limit results, and demonstrate that the proposed scheme can match the user performance and energy consumption of state-of-the-art approaches that do take full advantage of a centralized queue.

Generalized Random Sequential Adsorption on Erdős–Rényi Random Graphs

We investigate random sequential adsorption (RSA) on a random graph via the following greedy algorithm: Order the n vertices at random, and sequentially declare each vertex either active or frozen, depending on some local rule in terms of the state of the neighboring vertices. The classical RSA rule declares a vertex active if none of its neighbors is, in which case the set of active nodes forms an independent set of the graph. We generalize this nearest-neighbor blocking rule in three ways and apply it to the Erdős–Rényi random graph. We consider these generalizations in the large-graph limit

Critical window for the configuration model: finite third moment degrees

n\rightarrow \infty

Universality for critical heavy-tailed network models : metric structure of maximal components

n→∞ and characterize the jamming constant, the limiting proportion of active vertices in the maximal greedy set.

Solvable random network model for disordered sphere packing

A notorious problem in mathematics and physics is to create a solvable model for random sequential adsorption of non-overlapping congruent spheres in the d-dimensional Euclidean space with

Critical percolation on random networks with prescribed degrees

d\ge 2