🚀 go-pugleaf

Weekly SDI/LCS Seminar
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~hzhang/SDI/
Thursday, February 24, 2000
Noon - 1 pm
Hamerschlag Hall, Conference Room D210 (on even weeks)
Contacts:  karen@ece.cmu.edu and deb@cs.cmu.edu

Speaker:  Khalil Amiri

Title:  Dynamic function placement for data-intensive cluster computing

Abstract:

The dropping cost of magnetic storage, now cheaper than paper and film,
together with the explosion of Internet data servers and electronic
commerce continues to fuel a rapid growth in the size of on-line data
sets and in the number of important data-intensive applications. These
applications require resources beyond a single node and are often
distributed across many nodes.

Since remote communication is much more expensive than local
communication, the performance of such distributed applications is
sensitive not only to load imbalance across processors but also to the
amount of remote data access they perform. Remote data access is in turn
dictated by the partitioning, or the placement, of their functions
across the network. Optimal function placement for such applications is
hard, however, because it depends on several dynamically varying
workload and system characteristics, such as the amount of data moved
between functions and storage servers, node load, and the available
network bandwidth between nodes.

In this talk, I describe a dynamic approach to function placement in
which ``mobile'' functions automatically gravitate to the source and
sink storage servers they are accessing, or to other functions they are
closely communicating with. Preliminary experiments demonstrate that
dynamic and automatic function placement is feasible, results in
dramatic benefits for data-intensive and storage management
applications, ranging from 2-10X, and can resolve dynamic competition
over shared server resources. Moreover, it can be effectively performed
using simple black-box monitoring of objects and their
inter-communication. This talk describes a prototype implementation, and
discusses key design issues, current results and remaining challenges.

Bio:

Khalil is a fifth year ECE Ph.D. student. His interests include
distributed systems, filesystems and databases, and high-performance
servers. His publications can be accessed on-line at
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~amiri/ He plans to graduate some time this
summer. This is the first iteration of his job talk.