Speed scaling is a power management technique that involves dynamically changing the speed of a processor. We study policies for setting the speed of the processor for both of the goals of minimizing the energy used and the maximum temperature attained. The theoretical study of speed scaling policies to manage energy was initiated in a seminal paper by Yao et al. [1995], and we adopt their setting. We assume that the power required to run at speed s is P ( s ) = s α for some constant α > 1. We assume a collection of tasks, each with a release time, a deadline, and an arbitrary amount of work that must be done between the release time and the deadline. Yao et al. [1995] gave an offline greedy algorithm YDS to compute the minimum energy schedule. They further proposed two online algorithms Average Rate (AVR) and Optimal Available (OA), and showed that AVR is 2 α − 1 α α -competitive with respect to energy. We provide a tight α α bound on the competitive ratio of OA with respect to energy. We initiate the study of speed scaling to manage temperature. We assume that the environment has a fixed ambient temperature and that the device cools according to Newton's law of cooling. We observe that the maximum temperature can be approximated within a factor of two by the maximum energy used over any interval of length 1/ b , where b is the cooling parameter of the device. We define a speed scaling policy to be cooling-oblivious if it is simultaneously constant-competitive with respect to temperature for all cooling parameters. We then observe that cooling-oblivious algorithms are also constant-competitive with respect to energy, maximum speed and maximum power. We show that YDS is a cooling-oblivious algorithm. In contrast, we show that the online algorithms OA and AVR are not cooling-oblivious. We then propose a new online algorithm that we call BKP. We show that BKP is cooling-oblivious. We further show that BKP is e -competitive with respect to the maximum speed, and that no deterministic online algorithm can have a better competitive ratio. BKP also has a lower competitive ratio for energy than OA for α ≥5. Finally, we show that the optimal temperature schedule can be computed offline in polynomial-time using the Ellipsoid algorithm.

We introduce and evaluate a middleware clustering technology capable of allocating resources to web applications through dynamic application instance placement. We define application instance placement as the problem of placing application instances on a given set of server machines to adjust the amount of resources available to applications in response to varying resource demands of application clusters. The objective is to maximize the amount of demand that may be satisfied using a configured placement. To limit the disturbance to the system caused by starting and stopping application instances, the placement algorithm attempts to minimize the number of placement changes. It also strives to keep resource utilization balanced across all server machines. Two types of resources are managed, one load-dependent and one load-independent. When putting the chosen placement in effect our controller schedules placement changes in a manner that limits the disruption to the system.

Service providers rely on the management systems housed in their Network Operations Centers (NOCs) to remotely operate, monitor and provision their data networks. Lately there has been a tremendous increase in management traffic due to the growing complexity and size of the data networks and the services provisioned on them. Traffic engineering for management flows is essential for the smooth functioning of these networks to avoid congestion, which can result in loss of critical data such as billing records, network alarms, etc. As is the case with most intra-domain routing protocols, the management flows in many of these networks are routed on shortest paths connecting the NOC with the service provider's POPs (points of presence). This collection of paths thus forms a "confluent" tree rooted at the gateway router connected to the NOC. The links close to the gateway router may form a bottleneck in this tree resulting in congestion. Typically this congestion is alleviated by adding layer two tunnels (virtual links) that offload the traffic from some links of this tree by routing it directly to the gateway router. The traffic engineering problem is then to minimize the number of virtual links needed for alleviating congestion. The traffic engineering problem described above also has applications to alleviating congestion resulting from focused overloads in VoIP networks and for dealing with congesting resulting from flash crowds in the world wide web.In this paper we formulate a traffic engineering problem motivated by the above mentioned applications. We show that the general versions of this problem are hard to solve. However, for some simpler cases in which the underlying network is a tree, we design efficient algorithms. We use these algorithms as the basis for designing efficient heuristics for alleviating congestion in general (non-tree) service provider network topologies.

We first consider online speed scaling algorithms to minimize the energy used subject to the constraint that every job finishes by its deadline. We assume that the power required to run at speed s is P(s) = s/sup /spl alpha//. We provide a tight /spl alpha//sup /spl alpha// bound on the competitive ratio of the previously proposed optimal available algorithm. This improves the best known competitive ratio by a factor of 2/sup /spl alpha//. We then introduce an online algorithm, and show that this algorithm's competitive ratio is at most 2(/spl alpha//(/spl alpha/ - 1))/sup /spl alpha//e/sup /spl alpha//. This competitive ratio is significantly better and is approximately 2e/sup /spl alpha/+1/ for large /spl alpha/. Our result is essentially tight for large /spl alpha/. In particular, as /spl alpha/ approaches infinity, we show that any algorithm must have competitive ratio e/sup /spl alpha// (up to lower order terms). We then turn to the problem of dynamic speed scaling to minimize the maximum temperature that the device ever reaches, again subject to the constraint that all jobs finish by their deadlines. We assume that the device cools according to Fourier's law. We show how to solve this problem in polynomial time, within any error bound, using the ellipsoid algorithm.

A web content hosting service provider needs to dynamically allocate servers in a server farm to its customers' web sites. Ideally, the allocation to a site should always suffice to handle its load. However, due to a limited number of servers and the overhead incurred in changing the allocation of a server from one site to another, the system may become overloaded. The problem faced by the web hosting service provider is how to allocate the available servers in the most profitable way. Adding to the complexity of this problem is the fact that future loads of the sites are either unknown or known only for the very near future.In this paper we model this server allocation problem, and consider both its offline and online versions. We give a polynomial time algorithm for computing the optimal offline allocation. In the online setting, we show almost optimal algorithms (both deterministic and randomized) for any positive lookahead. The quality of the solution improves as the lookahead increases. We also consider several special cases of practical interest. Finally, we present some experimental results using actual trace data that show that one of our online algorithm performs very close to optimal.Interestingly, the online server allocation problem can be cast as a more general benefit task system that we define. Our results extend to this task system, which captures also the benefit maximization variants of the k-server problem and the metrical task system problem. It follows that the benefit maximization variants of these problems are more tractable than their cost minimization variants.

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in the operating systems research community in prefetching and caching data from parallel disks, as a technique for enabling serial applications to improve input--output (I/O) performance. In this paper, algorithms are considered for integrated prefetching and caching in a model with a fixed-size cache and any number of backing storage devices (disks). The integration of caching and prefetching with a single disk was previously considered by Cao, Felten, Karlin, and Li. Here, it is shown that the natural extension of their aggressive algorithm to the parallel disk case is suboptimal by a factor near the number of disks in the worst case. The main result is a new algorithm, reverse aggressive, with near-optimal performance for integrated prefetching and caching in the presence of multiple disks.

This paper presents cooperative prefetching and caching --- the use of network-wide global resources (memories, CPUs, and disks) to support prefetching and caching in the presence of hints of future demands. Cooperative prefetching and caching effectively unites disk-latency reduction techniques from three lines of research: prefetching algorithms, cluster-wide memory management, and parallel I/O. When used together, these techniques greatly increase the power of prefetching relative to a conventional (non-global-memory) system. We have designed and implemented PGMS, a cooperative prefetching and caching system, under the Digital Unix operating system running on a 1.28 Gb/sec Myrinet-connected cluster of DEC Alpha workstations. Our measurements and analysis show that by using available global resources, cooperative prefetching can obtain significant speedups for I/O-bound programs. For example, for a graphics rendering application, our system achieves a speedup of 4.9 over a non-prefetching version of the same program, and a 3.1-fold improvement over that program using local-disk prefetching alone.

The authors consider algorithms for integrated prefetching and caching in a model with a fixed-size cache and any number of backing storage devices (disks). Previously, the single disk case was considered by Cao et al. (1995). They show that the natural extension of their aggressive algorithm to the parallel disk case is suboptimal by a factor near the number of disks in the worst case. The main result is a new algorithm, reverse aggressive, with near-optimal performance in the presence of multiple disks.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.