Computer Science Speaking Skills Talk
Speaker
BENJAMIN BERG
Ph.D. Student
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
When
-
Where
In Person
Description
Modern computer systems allow resources to be dynamically allocated to parallelizable jobs. When a job is parallelized across many servers or cores, it will complete more quickly. However, jobs typically receive diminishing returns from being allocated additional resources. Hence, given a fixed number of cores, it is not obvious how to dynamically allocate cores to a stream of incoming jobs in order to minimize the overall mean response time across jobs.
For example, an optimal allocation policy must favor shorter jobs, but favoring any single job too heavily can cause the system to operate very inefficiently. Additionally, an optimal policy must decide how much, if at all, to favor more parallelizable jobs over less parallelizable jobs. In a variety of settings, we show how to derive an optimal allocation policy which minimizes mean response time. We then show that policies inspired by our theoretical results can be implemented in a modern database to reduce mean response time by a factor of 2.
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the CSD Speaking Skills Requirement.