Keynote 2: Wednesday (August 24, 2022) 9:15 am - 10:15 am

Adam Belay

Jamieson Career Development Associate Professor, MIT

Speech: Improving Datacenter Utilization through Faster Resource Management

Abstract:

Over the last decade, workload consolidation through virtual machines and containers has played a major role in improving the utilization of datacenters. However, despite packing many tasks together on each machine, a surprising fraction of cores and memory are still left idle. In this talk, I will examine why achieving higher utilization is difficult and why improving it is key to reducing the environmental footprint and cost of datacenters. I will then discuss potential solutions, including a new OS scheduler that can maintain performance isolation when tasks share resources on the same machine and a new cloud programming model that enables fungible allocation of resources across a cluster. Both systems demonstrate large benefits to adopting faster resource management mechanisms.