A Step toward Deploying Real-Time Applications on Computer Clouds

When: Wednesday, November 5, 
2014
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Shangping Ren, Illinois Institute of Technology

Host: Prof. Albert Cheng

Cloud technology has been benefiting general purpose computing for a number of years by now. The pay-on-demand model and “unlimited resource" provided by cloud computing allows companies to avoid over-provisioning: computation resources can be dynamically allocated to tasks when more resources are needed by the applications; and when current provision or a private computer cloud is fully utilized, cloud bursting techniques can also temporarily acquire external resources from public clouds to fulfill the need.

However, such advantages have barely, if at all, been taken by real-time applications where timing predictability is critical. Among the many challenges faced by real-time applications to utilize computer clouds, one is to understand the behavior of a virtual machine launching process, its time and resource demands, and how it impacts and is impacted by system resources and a cloud system operational status. The second challenge is: as multiple groups of applications may be deployed to the same physical host machine through VMs, a dedicated host machine is now partitioned among many groups (VMs) deployed on it. Traditional real-time scheduling theories, which were based, dedicated resource may not be applicable anymore in the domain of periodic resources.

In this talk, I would like to share the work that we have done in the two areas: (1) the development of a VM launch overhead reference model; and (2) the study of integrating periodic resources.

Bio:

Dr. Shangping Ren is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997. Before she joined IIT in 2003, she worked as a Software Engineer and a Lead Software Engineer in software and telecommunication companies for over five years. She was an NSF CAREER awardee and has also won IIT Sigma Xi and Dean's Excellence Research Awards. Her research interests are in the areas of real-time computing, distributed systems, cyber-physical systems, and cloud computing.