The article focuses on an understudied yet fundamental problem: existing methods typically average the utilization of multiple hardware threads to evaluate the available CPU resources. However, the approach could underestimate the actual usage of the underlying physical core for Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) processors, leading to an overestimation of remaining resources. The overestimation propagates from microarchitecture to operating systems and cloud schedulers, which may misguide scheduling decisions, exacerbate CPU overcommitment, and increase Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. To address the potential overestimation problem, we propose an SMT-aware and purely data-driven approach namedRemaining CPU(RCPU) that reserves more CPU resources to restrict CPU overcommitment and prevent SLA violations. RCPU requires only a few modifications to the existing cloud infrastructures and can be scaled up to large data centers. Extensive evaluations in the data center proved that RCPU contributes to a reduction of SLA violations by 18% on average for 98% of all latency-sensitive applications. Under a benchmarking experiment, we prove that RCPU increases the accuracy by 69% in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE) compared to the state-of-the-art.

Software deployment misconfiguration often happens and has been one of the major causes of deployment failures that give rise to service interruptions. However, there is currently no existing approach to automatically repairing deployment failures. We propose DeployFix, which automatically repairs software deployment failures via constraint solving in the dynamic-changing deployment environments. DeployFix first defines DeployIR as a unified intermediate representation to achieve the translation of heterogeneous specifications from different schedulers with different syntaxes. By reducing the root-cause analysis of deployment failures to the conflict resolution in propositional logic, DeployFix uses off-the-shelf constraint solvers to achieve automatic localization and diagnosis of conflicting constraints, which are the root causes of deployment failures. DeployFix finally resolves the conflicting constraints and generates repaired deployment configurations in terms of practical requirements. We evaluate DeployFix in both simulation and production environments with tens of thousands of nodes at Alibaba, on which tens of thousands of applications are running guided by hundreds of thousands of deployment constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that DeployFix outperforms the state of the art and it correctly repairs the deployment failures in minutes, even in a large production data center.

It has become increasingly thorny for computer vision competitions to preserve fairness when participants intentionally fine-tune their models against the test datasets to improve their performance. To mitigate such unfairness, competition organizers restrict the training and evaluation process of participants' models. However, such restrictions introduce massive computation overheads for organizers and potential intellectual property leakage for participants. Thus, we propose Themis, a framework that trains a noise generator jointly with organizers and participants to prevent intentional fine-tuning by protecting test datasets from surreptitious manual labeling. Specifically, with the carefully designed noise generator, Themis adds noise to perturb test sets without twisting the performance ranking of participants' models. We evaluate the validity of Themis with a wide spectrum of real-world models and datasets. Our experimental results show that Themis effectively enforces competition fairness by precluding manual labeling of test sets and preserving the performance ranking of participants' models.