Abstract: Data Centers have emerged as one of the dominant forms of cloud computing. Consequently, there are several interesting (new) questions related to scheduling that arise. In this survey talk, we discuss several problems related to scheduling in data centers. The talk covers job scheduling problems related to utilization efficiency of VMs, along with questions dealing with basic communication issues that arise when multiple competing applications are running. We will also briefly discuss questions related to scheduling on multiple-data centers. Many of these problems are NP-hard and we develop approximation algorithms to tackle these problems.
Bio: Samir Khuller received his Ph.D from Cornell University in 1990 under the supervision of Vijay Vazirani. He is currently a professor and distinguished scholar teacher at the University of Maryland. From 2003 to 2008 he was the Associate Chair for Graduate Education. and from 2012-2017 he was the Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair for CS. As chair he led the development of the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation, a project slated for completion in March 2019. Starting March 1 (2019), he will be joining as the Adrienne and Barris Chair of CS at Northwestern University.
His research interests are in graph algorithms, discrete optimization, and computational geometry. He has published about 200 journal and conference papers, and several book chapters on these topics. He was an editor for the journal Algorithmica, and International Journal on Foundations of Computer Science, problems Editor for ACM Trans. on Algorithms, Associate Editor for Networks. He has served on several program committees. He was on the APPROX and ESA Steering committees for many years, and will chair the program committee of the 2019 MAPSP Scheduling Workshop. From 2018-2021 he will serve as the Chair of SIGACT. He received the National Science Foundation’s Career Development Award, several Dept. Teaching Awards, the Dean’s Teaching excellence Award and also a CTE-Lilly Teaching Fellowship. In 2003, he and his students were awarded the “Best newcomer paper” award for the ACM PODS and in 2016, he received the European Symposium on Algorithms inaugural Test of Time Award for his work with Sudipto Guha on Connected Dominating Sets. His research has been funded by NSF, Amazon, Adobe, Google and DoD.