Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users. Definition The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology's definition of cloud computing identifies "five essential characteristics":

On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.
Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that

Adding flexibility to multi-tenant networks

Georgios Ioannidis

Cloud computing has been experiencing sharp development over the last years, leading to an increased demand for application migration to the cloud. Cloud providers, in an effort to attract more customers and earn their confidence, offer to tenants the illusion of an isolated network, exposing familiar abstractions. At the same time, creating this illusion poses challenging problems for the providers, as one tenant's traffic may interfere with another's in complicated, unpredictable ways. First, new challenges have arisen in administering access-control rules (ACLs). On the one hand, installing ACLs at the server is incompatible with bare-metal support and introduces unnecessary performance overhead. On the other hand, offloading the most popular ACLs on the limited hardware memory in Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches should not be conducted naïvely, as the existence of wildcard rules presents inter-rule dependencies that must be respected. Second, tenants' demands have evolved beyond requesting hardware resources; for instance, tenants may require bandwidth provisions between their resources or optimized access to a specific cloud service, e.g., a Mail server or a Database. Cloud providers have not adequately adapted to these expanding demands, therefore elevating hardware resources to "first class citizens," as non-hardware constraints are not considered during resource allocation, instead they are applied afterwards. In this thesis we propose two architectures that facilitate cloud providers in managing their shared network resources in a flexible way. First, we demonstrate virtual flow tables, a ToR architecture that handles ACLs using a two-level memory hierarchy. The most popular ACLs are stored in the limited hardware memory, respecting any dependencies between wildcard rules, while the ToR's supervisor engine maintains access to the entire ACL rule-set. Second, we present a two-tiered architecture for scheduling cloud resources, consisting of a resource-agnostic scheduling layer and a resource-specific enforcement layer. Network resources and constraints are taken into consideration during resource scheduling, instead of afterwards, while resource provisioning, as well as general network-management policies, are delegated to the resource-specific tier.

EPFL2018

Multi-Objective System-Level Management of Modern Green Data Centers

Ali Pahlevan

In our modern society, the average citizen has turned into a daily cloud user. Despite being virtually transparent for the user, internet services require data centers behind the scenes. Data centers burn several megawatts of power and their electricity bill is a major fraction of their costs. Hence, modern cloud data centers need to tackle efficiently the increasing demand for computing resources while at the same time addressing the energy efficiency challenge. This is a complex optimization problem that worsens as more constraints and objectives are added. In public clouds, virtualization transforms a data center into a flexible cloud infrastructure in which Virtual Machines (VMs) behave as separate entities that share physical hardware resources. Therefore, it is essential to develop resource provisioning policies that are aware of VMs characteristics and applicable in dynamic scenarios. To address these challenges, this thesis first presents heuristic and Machine Learning (ML)-based VM allocation methods for various data center scenarios. Then, a novel hyper-heuristic algorithm is proposed that exploits the benefits of both methods by dynamically finding the best one according to a user-defined metric. However, optimizing the energy and cost of a single data center powered by the grid is not enough in today's cloud computing, where multiple data centers are used to deploy online services, and utilize renewable energy sources to reduce their carbon footprint. This thesis also presents a two-phase multi-objective VM placement along with a dynamic migration technique, for geo-distributed data centers coupled with renewable and Electrical Energy Storage (EES) sources to tackle the challenges of operational cost optimization and energy-performance trade-offs. Furthermore, in order to efficiently minimize cost, power market operators have recently introduced emerging demand-response programs, in which electricity consumers regulate their power usage following providers' requests. Therefore, it is essential to develop bidding strategies for data centers to participate in emerging power markets together with power management policies that are aware of power market requirements at run-time. In this thesis I also propose a strategy to jointly optimize the data center demand-response provision problem and VM allocation that satisfies the hour-ahead power market constraints in the presence of renewable and EES energy. Even if novel data center resource management techniques can efficiently tackle the dramatic increase in the number of servers, each computing server remains power limited due to effect of post-Dennard scaling. Therefore, techniques such as Near-Threshold Computing (NTC) need to complement novel system-level approaches to improve data centers' energy efficiency. For this purpose, I first use an accurate power modeling characterization for a new server architecture based on the Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FD-SOI) process technology that enables NTC features. Then, I explore the new energy-performance trade-offs brought by NTC servers when executing virtualized applications. Finally, based on this analysis, I propose an energy proportionality-aware VM allocation method at data center level that exploits the knowledge of VMs characteristics together with the accurate power model presented for NTC servers. As a result, the proposed approach increases the energy proportionality of next-generation NTC-based data centers.

EPFL2019

Yu Tang

Given a large collection of tree-structured objects (e.g., XML documents), the similarity join finds the pairs of objects that are similar to each other, based on a similarity threshold and a tree edit distance measure. The state-of-the-art similarity join methods compare simpler approximations of the objects (e.g., strings), in order to prune pairs that cannot be part of the similarity join result based on distance bounds derived by the approximations. In this paper, we propose a novel similarity join approach, which is based on the dynamic decomposition of the tree objects into subgraphs, according to the similarity threshold. Our technique avoids computing the exact distance between two tree objects, if the objects do not share at least one common subgraph. In order to scale up the join, the computed subgraphs are managed in a two-layer index. Our experimental results on real and synthetic data collections show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by up to an order of magnitude.

Assoc Computing Machinery2015

Adding flexibility to multi-tenant networks

Georgios Ioannidis

EPFL2018

Multi-Objective System-Level Management of Modern Green Data Centers

Ali Pahlevan

EPFL2019

Adding flexibility to multi-tenant networks

Multi-Objective System-Level Management of Modern Green Data Centers

Scaling Similarity Joins over Tree-Structured Data

Adding flexibility to multi-tenant networks

Multi-Objective System-Level Management of Modern Green Data Centers

Scaling Similarity Joins over Tree-Structured Data