On Managing Heterogeneity in Production Cloud Computing Environments

The past few years have witnessed the rise of cloud computing, a paradigm that harnesses massive resource capacity of data centers to support Internet services and applications in a scalable, flexible, reliable and cost-efficient manner. However, despite its success, recent literature has shown that effectively managing resources in production cloud environments remains to be a difficult challenge. A key reason behind this difficulty is that both resources and workloads found in production environments are heterogeneous. In particular, large cloud data centers often consist of machines with heterogeneous resource capacities and performance characteristics. At the same time, real cloud workloads show significant diversity in terms of priority, resource requirements, demand characteristics and performance objectives. Consequently, finding an effective resource management solution that leverages resource heterogeneity to support diverse application performance objectives becomes a difficult problem.

The focus of this talk will be on understanding the research challenges introduced by resource and workload heterogeneity in production cloud environments. We will first provide a characterization of workload and resource heterogeneities found in production data centers, and highlight the key challenges introduced by them. We will then describe our recent work towards addressing some of these challenges. Finally, we will outline several key directions for future research.

Short Bio: Raouf Boutaba is a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo (Canada) and a distinguished visiting professor at POSTECH (South Korea). He served as a distinguished speaker of the IEEE Communications Society and the IEEE Computer Society. He is the founding chair of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Autonomic Communications, and the founding Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (2007-2010). He is currently on the advisory editorial board of the Journal of Network and Systems Management, and on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, the IEEE Communication Surveys and Tutorials, the KICS/IEEE Journal of Communications and Networks, the
International Journal on Network Management (ACM/Wiley), the Wireless Communications and Mobile  Computing (Wiley) and the Journal on Internet Services and Applications (Springer). His research interests include resource and service management in networked systems. He has published extensively in these areas and received several journal and conference best paper awards such as the IEEE 2008 Fred W. Ellersick Prize Paper Award, the 2001 KICS/IEEE  Journal on Communications and Networks Best Paper Award, the IM 2007 and 2009 and the CNSM 2010 Best Paper Awards among others. He also received several recognitions such
as the Premier's Research Excellence Award, two Nortel research
excellence Awards, a fellowship of the Faculty of Mathematics, a David R. Cheriton faculty fellowship, 2 outstanding performance awards at Waterloo and the NSERC discovery accelerator award. He has also received the IEEE Communications Society Hal Sobol Award and the IFIP Silver Core in 2007, the IEEE Communications Society Joe LociCero award and the IFIP/IEEE Dan Stokesbury award in 2009. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Guaranteeing QoS in Networking Services

Abstract: There is an abundance of networking services offered over the Internet, such as VoIP, teleconference, IPTV, presence, and instant messaging, to name a few. A service can be setup using various protocols, such as, HTTP, SIP, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), the Intellingent Network, and REST. Real-time services, such as VoIP and teleconference, have stringent  QoS requirements. That is, the one-way end-to-end delay has to be less than 150 msec (though this constraint can be pushed to as much as to 200 msec or even a little beyond), the jitter should not exceed 30 msec, and the packet loss should be less than 1%. MPLS is a well-known solution for providing QoS in the transport network and it is often combined with the popular DiffServ architecture. However, how does a signaling protocol interact with the QoS-enabled transport network to request a new QoS connection for a multimedia session that is currently being negotiated? In addition, what are some of the problems involved in setting up a QoS connection? In this talk, we will focus on SIP and IMS. We will first examine the salient features of SIP and IMS, and various architectures for developing application servers. Subsequently we will describe the  Resource and Admission Control Functions (RACF), a scheme introduced in NGN to ensure QoS for multimedia sessions,which can also work with OpenFlow. Finally, we will conclude with a discussion of some of the performance issues that arise in the deployment of RACF, such as multi-domain routing, and bandwidth allocation so that the end-to-end delay, jitter, and packet loss constraints of real-time applications, such as VoIP and interactive video, are met.

Short Bio: Harry G. Perros is a Professor of Computer Science, an Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor, and the Program Coordinator of the Master of Science degree in Computer Networks at NC State University. He is an IEEE Fellow and he has published extensively in the area of performance modelling of computer and communication systems, and he has organized several national and international conferences. He has also published three print books and an e-book, and he is currently completing a book on networking services. His current research interests are in the areas of networking services, resource allocation for video traffic under QoS, and queueing theory.

Optical Networks for Developing Countries

Abstract: Optical Networks are already a reality in most developed countries but developing countries are still straggling to build their main communication backbone using an adequate technology. Several developing countries still do not have a fully implemented backbone communication, even using old technologies as ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) or SONET (Synchronous Optical Network), but they must consider a high technological jump to keep up with a globalized world, considering state of the art optical technology as DWDM (Dense wavelength Division Multiplexing), a great opportunity to keep up with the developed world given that there is almost no old infrastructure to amortize. Consequently, this talk will describe the state of the art in optical networks, summarizing main research topics in the area as RWA (Routing and Wavelength assignment), WCA (Wavelength Converter Allocation), Network Protection and Survivability, QoS (Quality of Service) in optical networks, among other future trends, emphasizing the opportunity to developing countries. Finally, the talk will shortly present some optical network projects in a small country as Paraguay sharing experiences that may be useful for other developing countries.

Short Bio: Prof. Benjamín Barán received a degree in Electronic Engineering from the National University of Asuncion - Paraguay, a M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University – U.S.A. and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – Brazil. With more than 3 decades of teaching and research experience at several universities, he also served as international consultant for international institutions as ITU, UNDP, UNESCO, BID and World Bank among others. He received several scientific awards as the Paraguayan National Science Award in 1996 and the Pan-American PACIS Prize of Scientific Computing 2012 in Mexico. He was President of the Latin American Center on Informatics Studies – CLEI and Research Coordinator at the National Computing Center (CNC) of the National University of Asuncion. He was also the first Coordinator of Doctoral Studies in Computing Engineering in Paraguay. With more than one hundred published papers, his research interests focused on Parallelization and Optical Networks, Multiobjective Optimization and Evolutionary Computation.