Cutting Tail Latency in Cloud Data Stores via Adaptive Replica Selection

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                        Networking Group Seminar
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Speaker:        Dr. Marco Canini
                Universite catholique de Louvain

Title:          "Cutting Tail Latency in Cloud Data Stores via Adaptive
                 Replica Selection"

Date:           Monday, 13 April 2015

Time:           1:30pm to 2:50pm

Venue:          Room 2504 (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Achieving predictable performance is critical for many distributed
applications, yet difficult to achieve due to many factors that skew the
tail of the latency distribution even in well-provisioned systems. In this
talk, we will present the fundamental challenges involved in designing a
replica selection scheme that is robust in the face of performance
fluctuations across servers. We illustrate these challenges through
performance evaluations of the Cassandra distributed database on Amazon
EC2. We then present the design and implementation of an adaptive replica
selection mechanism, C3, that is robust to performance variability in the
environment. We demonstrate C3's effectiveness in reducing the latency
tail and improving throughput through extensive evaluations on Amazon EC2
and through simulations. Our results show that C3 significantly improves
the latencies along the mean, median, and tail (up to 3 times improvement
at the 99.9th percentile) and provides higher system throughput.

Paper to appear at
NSDI'15: http://perso.uclouvain.be/marco.canini/papers/c3.nsdi15.pdf

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Biography:

Marco Canini is an assistant professor in the ICTEAM institute at the
Universite catholique de Louvain. Marco obtained his Ph.D. in computer
science and engineering from the University of Genoa in 2009 after
spending the last year as a visiting student at the University of
Cambridge, Computer Laboratory. He holds a laurea degree with honors in
computer science and engineering from the University of Genoa. He was a
postdoctoral researcher at EPFL from 2009 to 2012 and after that a senior
research scientist for one year at Deutsche Telekom Innovation Labs & TU
Berlin. He also held positions at Intel Research and Google. Personal
page: http://perso.uclouvain.be/marco.canini/