More Like this

1. Chasing the Signal: Statistically Separating Multi-Tenant I/O Workloads

   Chen, S. ; Wildani, A. ( December 2018 , Machine Learning in Systems)

   Identifying the characteristics of a storage workload is critical for resource provisioning for metrics including performance, reliability, and utilization. Although multi-tenant systems are increasingly commonplace, characterization of multiple workloads within a single system trace is difficult because workloads are highly dynamic and typically not labeled. We show that, by converting a block I/O workload to a signal and applying blind source separation, we are able to successfully separate many application workloads. 

   more » « less
2. Chasing the Signal: Statistically Separating Multi-Tenant I/O Workloads

   Chen, Si ; Wildani, Avani ( December 2018 , Machine Learning for Systems)

   Identifying the characteristics of a storage workload is critical for resource provisioning for metrics including performance, reliability, and utilization. Although multi-tenant systems are increasingly commonplace, characterization of multiple workloads within a single system trace is difficult because workloads are highly dynamic and typically not labeled. We show that, by converting a block I/O workload to a signal and applying blind source separation, we are able to successfully separate many application workloads. 

   more » « less
3. Datamime: Generating Representative Benchmarks by Automatically Synthesizing Datasets

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO56248.2022.00082  

   Lee, Hyun Ryong ; Sanchez, Daniel ( October 2022 , 2022 55th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO))

   Benchmarks that closely match the behavior of production workloads are crucial to design and provision computer systems. However, current approaches fall short: First, open-source benchmarks use public datasets that cause different behavior from production workloads. Second, blackbox workload cloning techniques generate synthetic code that imitates the target workload, but the resulting program fails to capture most workload characteristics, such as microarchitectural bottlenecks or time-varying behavior. Generating code that mimics a complex application is an extremely hard problem. Instead, we propose a different and easier approach to benchmark synthesis. Our key insight is that, for many production workloads, the program is publicly available or there is a reasonably similar open-source program. In this case, generating the right dataset is sufficient to produce an accurate benchmark. Based on this observation, we present Datamime, a profile-guided approach to generate representative benchmarks for production workloads. Datamime uses the performance profiles of a target workload to generate a dataset that, when used by a benchmark program, behaves very similarly to the target workload in terms of its microarchitectural characteristics. We evaluate Datamime on several datacenter workloads. Datamime generates synthetic benchmarks that closely match the microarchitectural features of these workloads, with a mean absolute percentage error of 3.2% on IPC. Microarchitectural behavior stays close across processor types. Finally, time-varying behaviors are also replicated, making these benchmarks useful to e.g. characterize and optimize tail latency 

   more » « less
4. Autoscaling High-Throughput Workloads on Container Orchestrators

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CLUSTER49012.2020.00024  

   Zheng, Chao ; Kremer-Herman, Nathaniel ; Shaffer, Tim ; Thain, Douglas ( September 2020 , IEEE Conference on Cluster Computing)

   null (Ed.)

   High-throughput computing (HTC) workloads seek to complete as many jobs as possible over a long period of time. Such workloads require efficient execution of many parallel jobs and can occupy a large number of resources for a longtime. As a result, full utilization is the normal state of an HTC facility. The widespread use of container orchestrators eases the deployment of HTC frameworks across different platforms,which also provides an opportunity to scale up HTC workloads with almost infinite resources on the public cloud. However, the autoscaling mechanisms of container orchestrators are primarily designed to support latency-sensitive microservices, and result in unexpected behavior when presented with HTC workloads. In this paper, we design a feedback autoscaler, High Throughput Autoscaler (HTA), that leverages the unique characteristics ofthe HTC workload to autoscales the resource pools used by HTC workloads on container orchestrators. HTA takes into account a reference input, the real-time status of the jobs’ queue, as well as two feedback inputs, resource consumption of jobs, and the resource initialization time of the container orchestrator. We implement HTA using the Makeflow workload manager, WorkQueue job scheduler, and the Kubernetes cluster manager. We evaluate its performance on both CPU-bound and IO-bound workloads. The evaluation results show that, by using HTA, we improve resource utilization by 5.6×with a slight increase in execution time (about 15%) for a CPU-bound workload, and shorten the workload execution time by up to 3.65×for an IO-bound workload. 

   more » « less
5. Optimal Column Layout for Hybrid Workloads

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.14778/3358701.3358707  

   Athanassoulis, Manos ; Bøgh, Kenneth ; Idreos, Stratos ( September 2019 , Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment)

   Data-intensive analytical applications need to support both efficient reads and writes. However, what is usually a good data layout for an update-heavy workload, is not well-suited for a read-mostly one and vice versa. Modern analytical data systems rely on columnar layouts and employ delta stores to inject new data and updates. We show that for hybrid workloads we can achieve close to one order of magnitude better performance by tailoring the column layout design to the data and query workload. Our approach navigates the possible design space of the physical layout: it organizes each column’s data by determining the number of partitions, their corresponding sizes and ranges, and the amount of buffer space and how it is allocated. We frame these design decisions as an optimization problem that, given workload knowledge and performance requirements, provides an optimal physical layout for the workload at hand. To evaluate this work, we build an in-memory storage engine, Casper, and we show that it outperforms state-of-the-art data layouts of analytical systems for hybrid workloads. Casper delivers up to 2.32x higher throughput for update-intensive workloads and up to 2.14x higher throughput for hybrid workloads. We further show how to make data layout decisions robust to workload variation by carefully selecting the input of the optimization. 

   more » « less