DoC PhD student's joint research paper featured in "The Register"

A joint paper presented at the LADIS conference by Imperial, City and Microsoft Research is featured in the technology news website "The Register"

Luo Mai a PhD student here in the Department of Computing  along with his Supervisor Paulo Costa of Microsoft Reseach and Evangelia Kalyvianaki of City University have had their research paper  Exploiting Time-Malleability in Cloud-based Batch Processing Systems featured in the the technology news website "the Register". The paper was recently presented at the LADIS conference in Pennsylvania.

In summary their paper has  figured out a way cloud providers can take advantage of the chaotic properties of their infrastructure to sell users cheap workloads with less desirable performance characteristics, such as a potentially high job execution time.

The paper finds that cloud providers could make more money and waste less infrastructure by pricing and selling workloads according to the performance, capacity, and expected latency of jobs running in a cluster. They could charge less for jobs, such as MapReduce batch jobs, that might run a period of time after provisioned, or charge more for jobs to run immediately. Best of all, the system could be implemented as an algorithm at point-of-sale, fed by data taken from the provider's own monitoring tech.

This type of service is possible because major cloud providers such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have worked on sophisticated resource schedulers and cluster managers (such as Google's Borg or Omega systems) that give them the fine-grained control and monitoring necessary to resell hardware according to moment-by-moment demand and infrastructure changes.

Just as Amazon has a spot market for VMs today that adjusts prices according to demand, the researchers think there should be an equivalent market that prices workloads according the cost of executing them within a certain time period according to underlying resource utilization within the cloud. By implementing the proposed model, cloud providers can reduce the amount of idle gear in their infrastructure, and developers can run certain jobs at reduced costs.

To read more please go to: http://www.theregister.co.uk/