Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Seminar
Speaker: Prof. Benjamin Lee, Duke University
Title: Rethinking the Pursuit of Datacenter Efficiency
Host: Profs. Abhishek Bhattarcharjee & Rajit Manohar
Abstract:
Sharing datacenter infrastructure improves energy efficiency, but whether strategic users participate in consolidated systems depends on management policies. Users who dislike allocations or perform poorly may deploy private, less-efficient systems. We address these challenges by combining insight in system architecture with methods in game theory and statistical learning. We illustrate this approach in two studies. First, we allocate server power by modeling strategic behavior and incentivizing participation. We design games in which users selfishly draw power for performance boosts yet avoid oversubscribing the shared supply. Second, we diagnose performance anomalies by constructing causal models that explain stragglers within parallel jobs. We then construct topic models that treat jobs’ models as documents and their fitted parameters as words to produce interpretable straggler diagnoses in Google’s datacenter.
Biography:
Benjamin Lee is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. He received his B.S. from the University of California at Berkeley, his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and his post-doctorate from Stanford University. He has held visiting positions at Microsoft Research, Intel Labs, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Dr. Lee’s interests include computer architecture, energy efficiency, and security. He builds interdisciplinary links to statistical learning and algorithmic economics. His research has been recognized by IEEE Micro Top Picks (4x), Communications of the ACM Research Highlights (3x), as well as paper honors from the ASPLOS, HPCA, MICRO, and SC conferences. He received the NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, and Google Faculty Research Award.