Speaker: Dr José Fortes When: Monday, Dec 10th, 2007 Time: 2:00pm Where: ECS 243

Abstract:
Well-managed data centers are expected to deliver guaranteed performance to applications, while minimizing costs by optimizing resource utilization. In virtualized data centers, virtualization enables the use of virtual containers, which can be managed separately and concurrently, into individual physical servers. The opportunity and challenge then become to simultaneously do on-demand provisioning of shared resources to virtual containers and the management of their capacities to meet service-quality targets at the least cost. This presentation describes a two-level resource management system with local controllers at the virtual-container level and a global controller at the resource-pool level. Autonomic resource allocation is realized through the interaction of the local and global controllers. A novelty of the controller designs is their use of fuzzy logic to efficiently and robustly deal with the complexity of the uncertainties of the dynamically changing workloads and resource usage. Experimental results obtained through a prototype implementation demonstrate that, for the scenarios under consideration, the proposed resource management system can significantly reduce resource consumption while still achieving application performance targets.

Biography:
José Fortes is a Professor and BellSouth Eminent Scholar at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering of the University of Florida. He founded and directs both the Advanced Computing and Information Systems laboratory and the NSF Industry-University Collaborative Center for Autonomic Computing. Prior to joining the University of Florida, he was a faculty member at Purdue University for eighteen years and served at the National Science Foundation as director of the Microelectronics Systems Architecture program.

His research interests are in the areas of distributed computing, autonomic computing, computer architecture, parallel processing and fault-tolerant computing. He has authored or coauthored over 180 technical papers and has lead the development and deployment of Grid-computing software used in several cyberinfrastructures for e-Science and digital government. His research has been funded by the Office of Naval Research, AT&T Foundation, IBM, General Electric, Intel, Northrop-Grumman, Army Research Office, NASA, Semiconductor Research Corporation and the National Science Foundation.

José Fortes is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) professional society and serves on the editorial boards of four technical journals.