In 2013, U.S. data centers accounted for 2.2% of the country’s total electricity consumption, a figure that is projected to increase rapidly over the next decade. Many important data center workloads in cloud computing are interactive, and they demand strict levels of quality-of-service (QoS) to meet user expectations, making it challenging to optimize power consumption along with increasing performance demands. This article introduces Hipster, a technique that combines heuristics and reinforcement learning to improve resource efficiency in cloud systems. Hipster explores heterogeneous multi-cores and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling for reducing energy consumption while managing the QoS of the latency-critical workloads. To improve data center utilization and make best usage of the available resources, Hipster can dynamically assign remaining cores to batch workloads without violating the QoS constraints for the latency-critical workloads. We perform experiments using a 64-bit ARM big.LITTLE platform and show that, compared to prior work, Hipster improves the QoS guarantee for Web-Search from 80% to 96%, and for Memcached from 92% to 99%, while reducing the energy consumption by up to 18%. Hipster is also effective in learning and adapting automatically to specific requirements of new incoming workloads just enough to meet the QoS and optimize resource consumption.

This work has been partially supported by the European Union FP7 program through the Mont-Blanc-3 (FP7-ICT-671697) and EUROSERVER (FP7-ICT-610456) projects, by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad under contract Computación de Altas Prestaciones VII (TIN2015- 65316-P), and the Departament de Innovació, Universitats i Empresa de la Generalitat de Catalunya, under project MPEXPAR: Models de Programació i Entorns d Execució Paral lels (2014-SGR-1051). Prior Publication: Rajiv Nishtala, Paul Carpenter, Vinicius Petrucci and Xavier Martorell. Hipster: Hybrid Task Manager for Latency-Critical Cloud Workloads. In Proceedings of the 23rd High Performance and Computer Architecture (HPCA 2017). In this work, we extend our previous work in several ways. First, we present an analysis of the size of the reward lookup table and an optimization for the table to improve the scalability of our reinforcement learning mechanism. Second, we demonstrate Hipster’s capability to adapt to changes in the latency-critical application at runtime and still satisfy QoS guarantees of the new incoming applications. Lastly, we present a deployment methodology for setting up new applications managed by Hipster’s runtime system. Author’s addresses: Rajiv Nishtala and Xavier Martorell, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Barcelona Supercomputing Center; Paul Carpenter, Barcelona Supercomputing Center; Vincius Petrucci, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil. emails:{rajiv.nishtala, paul.carpenter, xavier.martorell}@bsc.es; email: vpetrucci@ufba.br . ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, or contractor of the national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only. Permission to make digital or hard copies for personal or classroom use is granted. Copies must bear this notice and the full citation on the rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. To copy otherwise, distribute, republish, or post, requires prior speci c permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.

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