ITR: Feedback Control of Dynamic Computing Systems

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Software systems have become increasingly complex, and are expected toprovide service over wide operating ranges. To meet service goals,software developers provide many tuning parameters that must beset carefully for the system to provide acceptable performance andfunctionality. Tuning these parameters adequately often requires extensivetrial-and-error experimentation by system administrators. As workloads andoperating conditions continually change, the parameters must be endlesslyre-tuned to provide good performance.This research project will apply feedback control to automate thisparameter tuning loop in two example systems. The first, a wide-areareplicated file system, provides variable consistency and performancethrough optimistic concurrency control. Feedback will be used to schedulereplica reconciliation and data migration to provide acceptableperformance and consistency to end users. The second system, a databaseengine, offers a large variety of tuning parameters to be considered.Feedback control will be used to enable database administrators to managethe growing complexity of their server systems. From these two examples and other work, a framework for feedback control ofdynamic computing systems will begin to emerge. This framework will enablefuture computing systems to offer reliable and robust operation andpredictable performance, without costly maintenance and continual manualtuning.