Distinguished Lecture Series - Professor R. Srikant

Thursday, April 17, 2014 3:00 pm - 3:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Speaker

Professor R. Srikant, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

Title

Resource Allocation and Networking in Clouds and Data Centers

Abstract

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. 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 networks, which was first noticed in the context of resource allocation problems in the Internet and wireless networks. While we will primarily focus on addressing the issues that arise from the dynamics of job arrivals and departures, we will also point out interesting combinatorial problems that arise in cloud computing, such as vector packing and graph partitioning.

Speaker's biography

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.


A reception will follow in the EIT building atrium at 4:00 PM.