Motivation

The primary motivation for this work is the poor utilization of resources in data centers. Consolidation is often used to avert this problem, but ad-hoc mechanisms produce more problems. Ironically, the consolidated servers still see poor utilization but fail to meet service levels when bursty load comes.

The goal of this project is to explore the use of dynamic, control-based allocation of resources (CPU cycles, memory, network bandwidth, storage bandwidth, etc.) to:

  • enable a resource sharing system to achieve application-level QoS goals, and
  • minimize the resource requirements for whole application stacks. in a virtualized infrastructure.
consolidation.PNG

Approach

Our approach is to specify the desired behavior of an application-stack in terms of a set of metrics, monitor these metrics, and control the configuration of the system so that the desired behavior is achieved. We explictly monitor behaviour indicators from multiple locations in an application stack including applications software, systems software layers, and hardware stack. These indicators are then used as inputs to a control element, which makes decisions for the settings of actuators -- parameters that change behavior of a particular hardware or software layer.

Architecture

In our current system, the controller consists of two sub-controllers called AppController and NodeController. Every control interval,
  1. App controllers determine the resources to meet goals
  2. The requests for each VM are sent to node controllers
  3. Node controllers finally allocates resources
An example set of applications and how the controller interaction happens is below.

People

Publications

  • Arif Merchant, Mustafa Uysal, Pradeep Padala, Xiaoyun Zhu, Sharad Singhal and Kang G. Shin. Maestro: Quality-of-Service in Large Disk Arrays. In the proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC '11), Jun 2011. [PDF]. Best paper award!
  • Pradeep Padala, Mustafa Uysal, Arif Merchant, Xiaoyun Zhu, Sharad Singhal and Kang G. Shin. Performance Differentiation for Multi-port Arrays: A Control-Theoretic Approach. In the proceedings of the fourth International Workshop on Feedback Control Implementation and Design in Computing Systems and Networks (FEBID'09), Apr 2009. [PDF]
  • Pradeep Padala, Xiaoyun Zhu, Mustafa Uysal et al. Automatec Control of Multiple Resources. In the proceedings of the EuroSys 2009 [PDF] [PPT]
  • Jin Heo, Xiaoyun Zhu, Pradeep Padala, Zhikui Wang. Memory Overbooking and Dynamic Control of Xen Virtual Machines in Consolidated Environments. IFIP/IEEE Symposium on Integrated Management (IM'09) mini-conference, Jun 2009. [PDF].
  • Xiaoyun Zhu, Mustafa Uysal, Zhikui Wang, Pradeep Padala, Sharad Singhal, Arif Merchant, Kang Shin. What Does Control Theory Bring to Systems Research? To appear in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Jan 2009. [PDF].
  • Xue Liu, Xiaoyun Zhu, Padala Pradeep, Zhikui Wang, Sharad Singhal. Optimal Multivariate Control for Differentiated Services on a Shared Hosting Platform. In the proceedings of the 46th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC'07), Dec 2007. [PDF]
  • Pradeep Padala, Xiaoyun Zhu, Mustafa Uysal et al. Adaptive Control of Virtualized Resources in Utility Computing Environments. In the proceedings of the EuroSys 2007 [PDF]
  • Zhikui Wang, Xiaoyun Zhu, Pradeep Padala and Sharad Singhal. Capacity and Performance Overhead in Dynamic Resource Allocation to Virtual Containers. In the proceedings of the IFIP/IEEE Symposium on Integrated Management (IM'2007), May 2007. [PDF]