ABSTRACT: Cloud systems employ virtualization technology to provide resources in physical machines (PMs) in the form of virtual machines (VMs). Overloaded PMs lead to Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations while underloaded PMs lead to resource underutilization, which results in lower revenue for cloud providers. Under this dilemma, it is important for cloud providers to fully utilize cloud resources and meanwhile uphold the SLAs. In this talk, I will present three approaches to reduce overloaded and underloaded PMs in order to achieve load balance in a cloud system. The first approach achieves load balance in the initial VM allocation. It consolidates complementary VMs with spatial/temporal-awareness to reduce the number of PMs needed and reduce the number of VM migrations. The second approach achieves load balance by VM migration. It dynamically assigns different weights to different resources according to their usage intensity in the PM, which significantly reduces the time and cost to achieve load balance. The third approach achieves long-term load balance by VM migration. It relies on the Markov Decision Process (MDP) to allow a PM to proactively find an optimal action to transit to a long-term load balanced state. This research contributes to achieving higher profit for cloud providers and higher quality-of-service for cloud users. BIO: Dr. Haiying (Helen) Shen is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. She received the 2015 IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC) Mid-career Award, the 2010 Microsoft Faculty Fellowship Award, the 2013 NSF CAREER Award, the 2013 Sigma Xi Clemson Chapter Young Investigator Award, and the 2010 Faculty Excellence Award of Clemson University. Her research interests include Cloud computing and datacenters, Big data, Information retrieval, Content delivery networks, Cyber-physical systems, Internet of things, Mobile computing, High performance computing, and Social networks. She has been making independent contributions in the field with 193 publications in prestigious conferences and journals such as the Transactions on Networking (TON), IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed System (TPDS), IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), ACM Multimedia, International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), and IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP). She currently advises eleven Ph.D. students, one MS student and two undergraduate students. She is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributes Systems (IJPEDS), a Subject Area Editor for the Scalable Computing Journal, and was the Program Co-Chair for a number of international conferences and member of the Program Committees of many leading conferences.

Hosted by Professor Peter Reiher

REFRESHMENTS at 3:45 pm, SPEAKER at 4:15 pm