Events Calendar

Efficient Redundancy Techniques to Reduce Delay in Cloud Systems

Speaker: Gauri Joshi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Talk Title: Efficient Redundancy Techniques to Reduce Delay in Cloud Systems

Abstract: Ensuring fast and seamless service to users is critical for today's cloud services. However, guaranteeing fast response can be challenging due to random service delays that are common in today's data centers. In this talk I explore the use the redundancy to combat such service variability. For example, replicating a computing task at multiple servers and then waiting for the earliest copy saves service time. But the redundant tasks can cost more computing resources and also delay subsequent tasks. I present a queuing-theoretic framework to answer fundamental questions such as:
1) How many replicas to launch?
2) Which queues to join?
3) When to issue and cancel the replicas?

This framework reveals surprising regimes where replication reduces both delay as well as resource cost. The task replication idea can also be generalized to analyze latency in content download from erasure coded storage. More broadly, this work lays the theoretical foundation for studying queues with redundancy, uncovering many interesting future directions in cloud infrastructure, crowdsourcing and beyond.

Biography: Gauri Joshi is a Ph.D candidate at MIT EECS where she completed an S.M. in 2012. Her research interests include probabilistic modeling, coding theory and statistical inference. Before coming to MIT, she completed a B.Tech and M. Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 2010. She has held summer internships at Google, Bell Labs and Qualcomm. Gauri's awards and honors include the Best Thesis Prize in Computer science at MIT (2012), Institute Gold Medal of IIT Bombay (2010), Claude Shannon Research Assistantship (2015-16), and Schlumberger Faculty for the Future fellowship (2011-2015).

Host: Viktor Prasanna

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Suzanne Wong