Interference management for distributed parallel applications in consolidated clusters

Consolidating multiple applications on a system can improve the overall resource utilization of data center systems. However, such consolidation can adversely affect the performance of some applications due to interference caused by resource contention. Despite many prior studies on the interference effects in single-node systems, the interference behaviors of distributed parallel applications have not been investigated thoroughly. With distributed applications, a local interference in a node can affect the whole execution of an application spanning many nodes. This paper studies an interference modeling methodology for distributed applications to predict their performance under interference effects in consolidated clusters. This study first characterizes the effects of interference for various distributed applications over different interference settings, and analyzes how diverse interference intensities on multiple nodes affect the overall performance. Based on the characterization, this study proposes a static profiling-based model for interference propagation and heterogeneity behaviors. In addition, this paper presents use case studies of the modeling method, two interference-aware placement techniques for consolidated virtual clusters, which attempt to maximize the overall throughput or to guarantee the quality-of-service. © 2016 ACM.