arXiv subjects

Fiodar Kazhamiaka

Publications and source records attributed to Fiodar Kazhamiaka.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Multi-Scale Datacenter Power Modulation

Cloud datacenters must increasingly modulate power in response to time-varying grid and infrastructure constraints. We study this problem as finite-horizon control of a networked hybrid dynamical system, where datacenter power and service capacity depend on interactions between servers, workers, and hosted services. Power can be reduced through fast continuous worker throttling, which acts immediately but degrades service capacity, and slow discrete server transitions, which provide deeper savings but evolve with delay. Coordinating these mechanisms yields a high-dimensional mixed-integer dynamic optimization problem which is intractable to solve at scale. We propose a hierarchical receding-horizon controller that separates slow server reconfiguration from fast throttling recourse. For fixed server states, the throttling layer reduces to a service-level convex recourse problem solved efficiently by dual decomposition. The server layer then uses a ranked-prefix search that evaluates candidate configurations through the recourse value over the planning horizon. Experiments on realistic instances with over 15,000 servers, 200,000 workers, and 1,400 services show that the controller satisfies time-varying power caps with no violations and substantially lower service impact than fast-only or slow-only baselines. Our method offers significant speedups compared to standard optimization solvers, computing near-optimal plans within a 20 second real-time control interval.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Slasher: Power Flexibility for Cloud Datacenters

Datacenters consume many megawatts of power, and regularly encounter scenarios that require modulating their power draw. These scenarios include datacenter infrastructure failures, power grid failures, grid services, and more, spanning a diverse range of requirements in terms of the power magnitude, the scope of the reduction, the notice time, and other dimensions. To address these scenarios, we have built Slasher, a general system for modulating the power of \azure datacenters to handle scenarios ranging from individual racks to regional multi-datacenter grid events. Slasher coordinates datacenter resources with the goal of meeting power targets while minimizing negative impact on hosted workloads. In this paper, we review the main power modulation scenarios, characterize the power reduction levers using data from production cloud datacenters, describe Slasher's system architecture, and formulate the cloud datacenter power modulation control problem. We also develop a high-fidelity datacenter simulator and propose a workload impact model, using them to design and evaluate power control algorithms.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Energy Use of AI Inference, Efficiency Pathways, and Test-Time Scaling

As AI inference scales to billions of queries, estimates of per-query energy use are increasingly important for capacity planning, efficiency interventions, and policy. Yet many public estimates assume non-production settings, leading to systematic overestimation. We introduce a bottom-up framework estimating inference energy from token throughput, node power, and overhead under large-scale deployment assumptions. For frontier-scale models (>200B parameters) on H100 nodes, we estimate a median energy of 0.31 Wh/query (IQR 0.16-0.60), indicating widely cited estimates are overstated by 4-20x. In test-time scaling scenarios 15x longer than typical queries, the median energy rises 13x to 3.91 Wh (IQR 2.15-7.05). Across models, serving systems, and hardware, we estimate 8-20x line-of-sight energy reductions. At datacenter scale, serving 1 billion queries/day requires 0.7 GWh; if 10% are long queries, demand rises to 1.7 GWh/day. With efficiency interventions, it falls to 0.8 GWh/day, mitigating the energy impact of test-time scaling.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Natural Language Query to Configuration for Retrieval Agents

Modern retrieval agents expose many configuration choices -- LLM, retriever, number of documents, number of hops, and synthesis strategy -- each shaping both answer quality and serving cost. Today, these pipelines are typically hand-tuned once per workload, leaving substantial per-query optimization untapped. We formulate the problem: given a natural-language query and either an accuracy or a budget target, select from a predefined pipeline catalog the configuration that minimizes cost or maximizes accuracy at inference time. We propose **BRANE**, which uses an LLM to convert each query into workload-specific characteristics, then trains a lightweight per-configuration predictor that estimates whether the pipeline will answer the query correctly. At inference time, **BRANE** selects the configuration that maximizes predicted correctness penalized by cost, exposing a tunable cost-quality tradeoff without retraining. Across MuSiQue, BrowseComp-Plus, and FinanceBench, **BRANE** consistently pushes the cost-quality Pareto frontier, matches the best fixed configuration's accuracy at up to 89% lower cost, and outperforms LLM-routing, rule-based, and fine-tuned Qwen3-4B baselines. These results show that per-query configuration of the full retrieval pipeline is a practical alternative to static workload-level tuning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Designing Datacenter Power Delivery Hierarchies for the AI Era

Demand for AI accelerators is rapidly increasing rack power density, with projections approaching 1MW per deployment by 2027. This poses a major challenge for datacenter power delivery designers. As power densities increase, a datacenter designed for a different target density may strand power, i.e., may be unable to use all the power that its delivery hierarchy has provisioned. Designs must remain efficient over long datacenter lifetimes and multiple hardware generations. Power utilization is particularly important as grid power capacity is a scarce resource in the AI era. Designing an efficient power delivery hierarchy for the long run is difficult because rack placement feasibility, workload impact, and cost depend jointly on electrical topology, deployment granularity, placement policy, power oversubscription, and workload mix. Moreover, each of these factors evolve over time, have inter-dependencies across multiple resource dimensions, and generally do not lend themselves to closed-form analysis. To address this challenge, we develop a framework for evaluating datacenter power delivery designs using throughput, power, and cost metrics over realistic arrival, oversubscription, and decommissioning sequences. The framework combines projection models for GPU, compute, and storage deployments with operational factors grounded in production data from Microsoft Azure. Our results show that multi-resource stranding materially changes deployable capacity, effective capital expenditure, and delivered performance, and quantify how rising density from rack- and pod-scale AI systems shapes these outcomes. For AI datacenter design, the relevant planning objective is not installed megawatts, but deployable capacity over time.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Octopus: Enhancing CXL Memory Pods via Sparse Topology

The Compute Express Link (CXL) interconnect enables compute "pods" that pool memory across servers to reduce cost and improve efficiency. These pods also facilitate pairwise communication whose needs conflict with pooling. Importantly, existing pod designs are small or require indirection through expensive switches. These conventional designs implicitly assume that pods must fully connect all servers to all CXL pooling devices. This paper breaks with this conventional wisdom by introducing Octopus pods. Octopus directly connects servers to low-port-count CXL pooling devices (e.g., 4 ports) yet scales to large pods without switches by constructing a sparse CXL topology in which each pooling device connects to a carefully chosen subset of servers. Octopus explicitly balances "overlap", where two servers connect to the same pooling device: overlap reduces pooling efficiency but enables low-latency communication. Octopus resolves this tension by grouping servers into "islands" with low-latency intra-island communication and interconnecting islands to favor pooling. We build a three-server CXL pod prototype and simulate scaled pods with 96 servers under measured device characteristics and physical constraints (1.5 m copper cables). On hardware, Octopus RPCs are 3.2x faster than in-rack RDMA and 2.4x faster than CXL switches. In simulation, Octopus achieves net server cost savings of 3-5.4% whereas CXL switches result in a net cost increase.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2026

From Servers to Sites: Compositional Power Trace Generation of LLM Inference for Infrastructure Planning

Datacenter operators and electrical utilities rely on power traces at different spatiotemporal scales. Operators use fine-grained traces for provisioning, facility management, and scheduling, while utilities use site-level load profiles for capacity and interconnection planning. Existing datacenter power models do not capture LLM inference workloads, in which GPUs shift rapidly among compute-intensive prefill, lower-power decode, and idle states, and facility demand depends on how these states evolve and synchronize across many devices. We show that LLM inference power can be represented compositionally through two components: workload-driven transitions among operating states and configuration-specific power distributions within those states. Building on this observation, we develop a trace-generation framework that learns from measured traces and synthesizes power profiles for new traffic conditions and serving configurations. These traces aggregate from GPU servers to rack-, row-, and facility-scale load profiles at the temporal granularity required by the study. Across multiple LLMs, tensor-parallel settings, and GPU generations, our framework achieves median absolute energy error below 5% for most configurations while preserving temporal autocorrelation structure. The resulting traces support downstream analyses including oversubscription, power modulation, and utility-facing load characterization, enabling infrastructure evaluations that flat nameplate assumptions and static trace replay cannot support.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Carbon Explorer: A Holistic Approach for Designing Carbon Aware Datacenters

Technology companies have been leading the way to a renewable energy transformation, by investing in renewable energy sources to reduce the carbon footprint of their datacenters. In addition to helping build new solar and wind farms, companies make power purchase agreements or purchase carbon offsets, rather than relying on renewable energy every hour of the day, every day of the week (24/7). Relying on renewable energy 24/7 is challenging due to the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy. Inherent variations in solar and wind energy production causes excess or lack of supply at different times. To cope with the fluctuations of renewable energy generation, multiple solutions must be applied. These include: capacity sizing with a mix of solar and wind power, energy storage options, and carbon aware workload scheduling. However, depending on the region and datacenter workload characteristics, the carbon-optimal solution varies. Existing work in this space does not give a holistic view of the trade-offs of each solution and often ignore the embodied carbon cost of the solutions. In this work, we provide a framework, Carbon Explorer, to analyze the multi-dimensional solution space by taking into account operational and embodided footprint of the solutions to help make datacenters operate on renewable energy 24/7. The solutions we analyze include capacity sizing with a mix of solar and wind power, battery storage, and carbon aware workload scheduling, which entails shifting the workloads from times when there is lack of renewable supply to times with abundant supply.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Solving Large-Scale Granular Resource Allocation Problems Efficiently with POP

Resource allocation problems in many computer systems can be formulated as mathematical optimization problems. However, finding exact solutions to these problems using off-the-shelf solvers is often intractable for large problem sizes with tight SLAs, leading system designers to rely on cheap, heuristic algorithms. We observe, however, that many allocation problems are granular: they consist of a large number of clients and resources, each client requests a small fraction of the total number of resources, and clients can interchangeably use different resources. For these problems, we propose an alternative approach that reuses the original optimization problem formulation and leads to better allocations than domain-specific heuristics. Our technique, Partitioned Optimization Problems (POP), randomly splits the problem into smaller problems (with a subset of the clients and resources in the system) and coalesces the resulting sub-allocations into a global allocation for all clients. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence as to why random partitioning works well. In our experiments, POP achieves allocations within 1.5% of the optimal with orders-of-magnitude improvements in runtime compared to existing systems for cluster scheduling, traffic engineering, and load balancing.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Allocation of Fungible Resources via a Fast, Scalable Price Discovery Method

We consider the problem of assigning or allocating resources to a set of jobs. We consider the case when the resources are fungible, that is, the job can be done with any mix of the resources, but with different efficiencies. In our formulation we maximize a total utility subject to a given limit on the resource usage, which is a convex optimization problem and so is tractable. In this paper we develop a custom, parallelizable algorithm for solving the resource allocation problem that scales to large problems, with millions of jobs. Our algorithm is based on the dual problem, in which the dual variables associated with the resource usage limit can be interpreted as resource prices. Our method updates the resource prices in each iteration, ultimately discovering the optimal resource prices, from which an optimal allocation is obtained. We provide an open-source implementation of our method, which can solve problems with millions of jobs in a few seconds on CPU, and under a second on a GPU; our software can solve smaller problems in milliseconds. On large problems, our implementation is up to three orders of magnitude faster than a commerical solver for convex optimization.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

Don't Give Up on Large Optimization Problems; POP Them!

Resource allocation problems in many computer systems can be formulated as mathematical optimization problems. However, finding exact solutions to these problems using off-the-shelf solvers in an online setting is often intractable for "hyper-scale" system sizes with tight SLAs, leading system designers to rely on cheap, heuristic algorithms. In this work, we explore an alternative approach that reuses the original optimization problem formulation. By splitting the original problem into smaller, more tractable problems for subsets of the system and then coalescing resulting sub-allocations into a global solution, we achieve empirically quasi-optimal (within 1.5%) performance for multiple domains with several orders-of-magnitude improvement in runtime. Deciding how to split a large problem into smaller sub-problems, and how to coalesce split allocations into a unified allocation, needs to be performed carefully in a domain-aware way. We show common principles for splitting problems effectively across a variety of tasks, including cluster scheduling, traffic engineering, and load balancing.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

Heterogeneity-Aware Cluster Scheduling Policies for Deep Learning Workloads

Specialized accelerators such as GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and custom ASICs have been increasingly deployed to train deep learning models. These accelerators exhibit heterogeneous performance behavior across model architectures. Existing schedulers for clusters of accelerators, which are used to arbitrate these expensive training resources across many users, have shown how to optimize for various multi-job, multi-user objectives, like fairness and makespan. Unfortunately, existing schedulers largely do not consider performance heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose Gavel, a heterogeneity-aware scheduler that systematically generalizes a wide range of existing scheduling policies. Gavel expresses these policies as optimization problems, making it easy to optimize for objectives in a heterogeneity-aware way, while also being cognizant of performance optimizations like space sharing. Gavel then uses a round-based scheduling mechanism to ensure jobs receive their ideal allocation given the target scheduling policy. Gavel's heterogeneity-aware policies allow a heterogeneous cluster to sustain higher input load, and improve end objectives such as average job completion time and makespan by up to 3.5x compared to heterogeneity-agnostic policies.

cs.DC↗