Modeling applications for adaptive QoS-based resource management

This paper describes two innovative models that facilitate adaptive QoS-driven resource management is distributed systems comprising heterogeneous computing, storage, and communication resources. The first model, denoted the Logical Application Stream Model (LASM), recursively captures a distributed application's structure, resource requirements, and relevant end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) parameters. Upon invocation of the application by a user, the resource manager can use this model to initially structure the end-to-end application, allocate resources to this application, and schedule this application on these resources, so as to provide QoS to all applications and to efficiently utilize system resources; later, when the system state change, the resource manager can use this application model to dynamically reallocate, reschedule, and restructure applications. The recursive nature of the model enables application developers to easily model large-scale applications. We also describe a model, denoted the Benefit Function (BF), that captures user QoS preferences and enables the resource manager to gracefully degrade application QoS under certain conditions.