RISELab Newsletter, March 2017
Declarative Heterogeneity Handling for Datacenter and ML Resources
Challenge Heterogeneity in datacenter resources has become the fact of life. We identify and categorize a number of different types of heterogeneity. When talking about heterogeneity, we generally refer to static or dynamic attributes associated with individual resources. Previously the levels of heterogeneity were fairly benign and limited to a few different types of processor architectures. Now, however, it has become a common trend to deploy hardware accelerators (e.g., Tesla K40/K80, Google TPU, Intel Xeon PHI) and even FPGAs (e.g., Microsoft Catapult project). Nodes themselves are connected with heterogeneous interconnects, oftentimes with more than one interconnect option available (e.g., 40Gbps ethernet backbone, Infiniband, FPGA torus topology). The workloads we consolidate on top of this diverse hardware differ vastly in their success metrics (completion…
Join RISELab at NSDI’17
Join RISELab at NSDI’17 on March 27th through the 29th in Boston. There we will be presenting the Opaque and Clipper systems. Please see the below links to read the final versions of the papers and try pre-release versions of the software and check out slides and videos from their previous talks. Opaque system: The paper is already available here Software is available here Slides and video from a previous talk here Clipper system: The paper is available here Software is available here Slides and video from a previous talk here
RISELab at Spark Summit
This year, Spark Summit East was held in Boston between February 7-9. With over 1,500 attendees, this was the largest Spark Summit ever outside the Bay Area. Apache Spark, developed in large at AMPLab (the precursor of RISELab), is now the de-facto standard of big data processing. Like the previous Spark summits, UC Berkeley had a very strong presence. Ion Stoica gave a keynote on RISELab, describing the lab’s research focus on addressing a long-standing grand challenge in computing: enable machines to act autonomously and intelligently, to rapidly and repeatedly take appropriate actions based on information in the world around them. The presentation also discussed some early results from two recent projects, Drizzle and Opaque, which had their own presentations…
Serverless Scientific Computing
For many scientific and engineering users, cloud infrastructure remains challenging to use. While many of their use cases are embarrassingly parallel, the challenges involved in provisioning and using stateful cloud services keep them trapped on their laptops or large shared workstations. Before getting started, a new cloud user confronts a bewildering number of choices. First, what instance type do they need ? How do they make the compute/memory tradeoff? How large do they want their cluster to be? Can they take advantage of dynamic market-based instances (spot instances) that can disappear at any time? What if they have 1000 small jobs, each of which takes a few minutes — what’s the most cost-effective way of allocating servers? What host operating…