Performance and power modeling of multi-tier Web services. Using SML to develop composable models to predict performance (and answer what-if questions) about multi-tier Internet services.

  • Students: Peter Bodik, Rean Griffith (postdoc)
  • Collaborators: Moises Goldszmidt, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley
  • Alumni: Charles Sutton (RAD Lab postdoc, now professor at Univ. of Edinburgh)

Recent Papers: (PDFs can mostly be found here once camera-ready submitted)

  • Peter Bodík, Moises Goldszmidt, Hans Andersen, Armando Fox, Dawn Woodard. Fingerprinting the Datacenter: Automated Classification of Performance Crises. Proc. EuroSys 2010 (to appear).
  • Peter Bodík, Rean Griffith, Charles Sutton, Armando Fox, Michael Jordan, David Patterson. Automatic Exploration of Datacenter Performance Regimes. Proc. Workshop on Automatic Control for Datacenters and Clouds (ACDC 2009), Barcelona, Spain.
  • Peter Bodík, Moisés Goldszmidt, Armando Fox. HiLighter: Automatically Building Robust Signatures of Performance Behavior for Small- and Large-Scale Systems. Proc. SysML 2008, San Diego, CA, December 2008.
  • Peter Bodík, Charles Sutton, Armando Fox, David Patterson and Michael Jordan. Response-Time Modeling for Resource Allocation and Energy-Informed SLAs. Proc. SysML’07, Vancouver, BC, December 2007.

More Detail:

The intersection of power management and performance is of particular interest to us. Datacenter operators are interested in saving power only if there is no risk of violating the SLA (e.g. due to slower performance from being in a lower-power mode). Our goal is therefore to construct SML models that predict performance (i.e. SLA compliance) based on resource utilization and power state, allowing us to put parts of the system into a lower-power state without violating the SLA. Early results using nonlinear quantile regression show that we can keep the CPU in a low-power state for a higher percentage of the time than the CPU’s built-in power management policy (AMD PowerNow) while triggering few or none of the SLA violations caused by the built-in policy. Our eventual goal is that a collection of such analysis tools would inform the decisions of a “Datacenter Director” making global policy within the datacenter, in contrast to most current approaches in which components manage their own power and often end up working at cross-purposes.