SEAS Department Website

A wide variety of systems, including web farms, virtual machines, multi-tasking OSes, GRID computing systems, and sensor networks improve their accessibility, availability, resilience and fairness by “sharing” resources across the consumers they support. However, research that explores how to share resources generally derives point solutions, where different resource/consumer configurations require separately-designed sharing mechanisms. For instance, a scheduler often has implemented separately a single policy (e.g., FCFS, PS, FBPS, SPRT) optimized for a particular load setting, and cannot easily be switched to another policy when the situation changes. This project seeks to develop and analyze Adaptive Sharing Mechanisms (ASMs) in which the mechanism used to share resources adapts dynamically to both the set of available resources and the current needs of the consumers, such that the system is truly autonomic. We initiate our study with a modularization of the ASM into separate components, and then study the various components using both cutting edge novel control theoretic and scheduling analyses. The study ends with prototype and testing ASMs within a server farm environment. The grant extends over three years and is part of the NSF Computer Systems Research (CSR) program. Only approximately 10% of all grant applications were funded.