Lunch Seminar Talk by Qin Yin: Arosa: testbed resource allocation using late-binding and constraints

Speaker: Qin Yin

Talk title: Arosa: testbed resource allocation using late-binding and constraints

Abstract:

The development of distributed network testbeds like  ProtoGENI, VINI, etc., raises two closely-related challenges: firstly, how users should specify resources (nodes, links, switches) they wish to reserve in a flexible  manner, and secondly, how the testbed can best commit  or off er resources to users to achieve the highest possible  utilization of the infrastructure.

I will talk about Arosa, a fast resource allocator which allows users to reserve resources on nodes,  switches, and (virtual) links using a VF2-based embedding algorithm and is fast - it can reallocate resources on a large testbed in a matter of seconds on commodity  hardware, and outperforms the fastest system we could  find in the literature by two orders of magnitude.

In addition, Arosa provides flexibility in allocation  policies by describing both resource requests and resource commitments as constraint programs. Late- binding resources to clients opens up a wide design space  to optimize resource allocation for various metrics, such  as utilization, and can help to mask failures of physical  nodes from clients.

In evaluating our approach, we generate an extensive  test workload based on analysis of a 5-year trace of experiments submitted to the popular Emulab testbed and  the current ProtoGENI topology. We use this test workload to evaluate the performance of Arosa and VF2x, and  show that late-binding achieves higher utilization of resources and better masks network failures from clients  with resource reservations.