Designing the Next Generation Cloud Systems: An ML-Driven Approach

Red Hat Collaboratory Colloquium Event

Speaker: Christina Delimitrou, MIT

Abstract:

Cloud systems are experiencing significant shifts both in their hardware, with an increased adoption of heterogeneity, and their software, with the prevalence of microservices and serverless frameworks. These trends require fundamentally rethinking how the cloud system stack should be designed.

In this talk, I will briefly describe the challenges these hardware and software trends introduce, and discuss how applying machine learning (ML) to hardware design, cluster management, and performance debugging can improve the cloud’s performance, efficiency, predictability, and ease of use. I will first discuss Dagger, a reconfigurable network accelerator for microservices that shows the advantages of tightly-coupled peripherals, and then present Seer and Sage, two performance debugging systems that leverage ML to identify and resolve the root causes of performance issues in cloud microservices. I will conclude with the open questions that remain for cloud systems, and how ML can help address them.

Bio:

Christina Delimitrou is an Assistant Professor at MIT, where she works on computer architecture and computer systems. She focuses on improving the performance, predictability, and resource efficiency of large-scale cloud infrastructures by revisiting the way they are designed and managed. Christina is the recipient of the 2020 TCCA Young Computer Architect Award, an Intel Rising Star Award, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Scholarship, two Google Faculty Research Awards, and a Facebook Faculty Research Award. Her work has also received 5 IEEE Micro Top Picks awards and several best paper awards. Before joining MIT, Christina was a professor at Cornell University, and before that, she received her PhD from Stanford University. She had previously earned an MS also from Stanford, and a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. More information can be found at: http://people.csail.mit.edu/delimitrou/

Zoom:

Meeting ID: 944 0022 9257

Passcode: 564023