Title: Revenue-Optimising Scheduling in Parallel Stochastic Networks
Speaker: Dr. Giuliano Casale
Affiliation: Department of Computing – Imperial College London
Location: Room 145 Huxley Building
Time: 4:00pm

Abstract. Cloud applications are often deployed on multiple virtual machines (VMs) with heterogeneous compute capacities. In this setting, we consider the optimal static scheduling of users to application servers hosted in a set of parallel VMs. Our investigation seeks for a revenue-maximizing solution subject to resource utilization constraints, multiple classes of users, and a stochastic queueing-based description of latency experienced by the users at the VMs.
After overviewing the general characteristics of scheduling in queueing networks, and the underpinning optimization programs, I will show that under a limiting regime this problem reduces to a bilinear optimization program. I will then introduce an heuristic solution for this program and determine an optimality gap. I will also demonstrate the effectiveness of this heuristic in a real system implementation and in comparison to approximate solutions that rely on convex formulations.

About the speaker.