Resource Allocation and Networking in Clouds and Data Centers

We will present a survey of resource allocation and networking problems that arise in cloud computing clusters and data centers. Examples of problems that will be presented include cloud infrastructure provisioning, stream processing, green computing, data center networking, and data locality-based load balancing. The common theme in solving these problems is the use of queue length feedback to make optimal decisions, without the knowledge of traffic statistics. An optimal resource allocation scheme will be presented for one of the problems, the so-called Infrastructure-as-a-Service or IaaS problem, by exploiting a relationship between convex optimization and stochastic Lyapunov techniques.

R. Srikant is the Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Professor in the Coordinated Science Lab, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author or coauthor of two monographs, The Mathematics of Internet Congestion Control and Network Optimization and Control, and a coauthor of the book Communication Networks: An Optimization, Control and Stochastic Networks Perspective. His research interests include communication networks, queueing theory, machine learning, and optimization. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and is a Fellow of the IEEE.