arXiv subjects

Fa Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Fa Zhang.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

A Joint Optimization of Operational Cost and Performance Interference in Cloud Data Centers

Virtual machine (VM) scheduling is an important technique to efficiently operate the computing resources in a data center. Previous work has mainly focused on consolidating VMs to improve resource utilization and thus to optimize energy consumption. However, the interference between collocated VMs is usually ignored, which can result in very worse performance degradation to the applications running in those VMs due to the contention of the shared resources. Based on this observation, we aim at designing efficient VM assignment and scheduling strategies where we consider optimizing both the operational cost of the data center and the performance degradation of running applications and then, we propose a general model which captures the inherent tradeoff between the two contradictory objectives. We present offline and online solutions for this problem by exploiting the spatial and temporal information of VMs where VM scheduling is done by jointly consider the combinations and the life-cycle overlapping of the VMs. Evaluation results show that the proposed methods can generate efficient schedules for VMs, achieving low operational cost while significantly reducing the performance degradation of applications in cloud data centers.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2014

Improving the Load Balance of MapReduce Operations based on the Key Distribution of Pairs

Load balance is important for MapReduce to reduce job duration, increase parallel efficiency, etc. Previous work focuses on coarse-grained scheduling. This study concerns fine-grained scheduling on MapReduce operations. Each operation represents one invocation of the Map or Reduce function. Scheduling MapReduce operations is difficult due to highly screwed operation loads, no support to collect workload statistics, and high complexity of the scheduling problem. So current implementations adopt simple strategies, leading to poor load balance. To address these difficulties, we design an algorithm to schedule operations based on the key distribution of intermediate pairs. The algorithm involves a sub-program for selecting operations for task slots, and we name it the Balanced Subset Sum (BSS) problem. We discuss properties of BSS and design exact and approximation algorithms for it. To transparently incorporate these algorithms into MapReduce, we design a communication mechanism to collect statistics, and a pipeline within Reduce tasks to increase resource utilization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on scheduling MapReduce workload at this fine-grained level. Experiments on PUMA [T+12] benchmarks show consistent performance improvement. The job duration can be reduced by up to 37%, compared with standard MapReduce.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2013

Energy-Efficient Scheduling with Time and Processors Eligibility Restrictions

While previous work on energy-efficient algorithms focused on assumption that tasks can be assigned to any processor, we initially study the problem of task scheduling on restricted parallel processors. The objective is to minimize the overall energy consumption while speed scaling (SS) method is used to reduce energy consumption under the execution time constraint (Makespan $C_{max}$). In this work, we discuss the speed setting in the continuous model that processors can run at arbitrary speed in $[s_{min},s_{max}]$. The energy-efficient scheduling problem, involving task assignment and speed scaling, is inherently complicated as it is proved to be NP-Complete. We formulate the problem as an Integer Programming (IP) problem. Specifically, we devise a polynomial time optimal scheduling algorithm for the case tasks have a uniform size. Our algorithm runs in $O(mn^3logn)$ time, where $m$ is the number of processors and $n$ is the number of tasks. We then present a polynomial time algorithm that achieves an approximation factor of $2^{α-1}(2-\frac{1}{m^α})$ ($α$ is the power parameter) when the tasks have arbitrary size work. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm could provide an efficient scheduling for the problem of task scheduling on restricted parallel processors.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2013

GreenDCN: a General Framework for Achieving Energy Efficiency in Data Center Networks

The popularization of cloud computing has raised concerns over the energy consumption that takes place in data centers. In addition to the energy consumed by servers, the energy consumed by large numbers of network devices emerges as a significant problem. Existing work on energy-efficient data center networking primarily focuses on traffic engineering, which is usually adapted from traditional networks. We propose a new framework to embrace the new opportunities brought by combining some special features of data centers with traffic engineering. Based on this framework, we characterize the problem of achieving energy efficiency with a time-aware model, and we prove its NP-hardness with a solution that has two steps. First, we solve the problem of assigning virtual machines (VM) to servers to reduce the amount of traffic and to generate favorable conditions for traffic engineering. The solution reached for this problem is based on three essential principles that we propose. Second, we reduce the number of active switches and balance traffic flows, depending on the relation between power consumption and routing, to achieve energy conservation. Experimental results confirm that, by using this framework, we can achieve up to 50 percent energy savings. We also provide a comprehensive discussion on the scalability and practicability of the framework.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2013

Routing for Energy Minimization with Discrete Cost Functions

Energy saving is becoming an important issue in the design and use of computer networks. In this work we propose a problem that considers the use of rate adaptation as the energy saving strategy in networks. The problem is modeled as an integral demand-routing problem in a network with discrete cost functions at the links. The discreteness of the cost function comes from the different states (bandwidths) at which links can operate and, in particular, from the energy consumed at each state. This in its turn leads to the non-convexity of the cost function, and thus adds complexity to solve this problem. We formulate this routing problem as an integer program, and we show that the general case of this problem is NP-hard, and even hard to approximate. For the special case when the step ratio of the cost function is bounded, we show that effective approximations can be obtained. Our main algorithm executes two processes in sequence: relaxation and rounding. The relaxation process eliminates the non-convexity of the cost function, so that the problem is transformed into a fractional convex program solvable in polynomial time. After that, a randomized rounding process is used to get a feasible solution for the original problem. This algorithm provides a constant approximation ratio for uniform demands and an approximation ratio of $O(\log^{β-1} d)$ for non-uniform demands, where $β$ is a constant and $d$ is the largest demand.

cs.NI↗