Fall 2009 HKUST Database Seminar

Nov 9th, 2009

11:00am-12:00pm

Room 3401

Prof. Ashraf Aboulnaga

 

Title: Application Informed Tuning of Virtualized Environments
 
Abstract:
 
Virtualization is currently being used in cloud computing environments and
traditional IT environments to improve the flexibility and manageability of
the computing infrastructure, and to enable the sharing of computing
resources. This means that applications (such as database systems) are
increasingly being run on virtual machines and using virtualized storage. The
performance of an application in this environment is affected by the
configuration and tuning decisions made at the virtual machine/storage level.
In this talk, I will demonstrate that coordinating between the application
and the virtualization environment when making these tuning decisions can
result in significant performance gains. I will present three examples of
such application informed tuning: (1) configuring multiple virtual machines
running database workloads on the same physical server, (2) improving the
caching decisions of a storage server running a database workload, and
(3) scheduling a batch of Map-Reduce jobs running on a cluster of virtual
machines.
Bio: 
 
Ashraf Aboulnaga is an Associate Professor in the
 David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at 
the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, 
Canada. His research interests are in the area of 
database management, with a current focus on cloud 
computing and virtualization, data integration on 
the web, self-managing database systems, and XML 
databases. Ashraf obtained his PhD from the 
University of Wisconsin - Madison in 2002. He was 
a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden 
Research Centre from 2002 to 2004. He is an IBM
Centre for Advanced Studies Faculty Fellow and a 
recipient of a Google Research Award and the 
Ontario Early Researcher Award.
 

 

 

Previous Seminar Achieves

 

Spring 2006

Spring 2006

Fall 2006