26 March 2014

Dr. Anshul Gandhi (IBM Research Watson) is giving a talk on 'Providing Performance Guarantees for Cloud Applications'.

Where and when? UCD CSI Boardroom, 26th March 2014, 2.30pm.

Abstract: Applications with a dynamic workload demand need access to a flexible infrastructure to meet performance guarantees and minimize resource costs. While cloud computing provides the elasticity to scale the infrastructure on demand, cloud service providers lack control and visibility of user-space applications, making it difficult to accurately scale the underlying infrastructure. Thus, the burden of scaling falls on the user. That is, the user must determine when to trigger scaling, and how much to scale by. In this talk, I will present our ongoing work at IBM aimed at providing a cloud service that automatically scales the infrastructure to meet the user-specified performance requirements, even when multiple user applications are running concurrently. We leverage application level metrics, along with resource usage metrics, to more accurately scale the infrastructure when compared with existing cloud scaling technologies that only use resource usage metrics. We employ Kalman filtering to automatically learn the (possibly changing) system parameters for each application, thereby proactively scaling the infrastructure to meet the user-specified performance requirements.

Anshul Gandhi completed Ph.D. at the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University in June 2013 on Dynamic Server Provisioning for Data Center Power Management. Awarded the 2013 SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award for PhD thesis. Since August 2013, is a Post Doctoral Researcher in the Cloud Optimization and Analytics group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. From August 2014, will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University.