James Smith

I found out this week that Ali Khajeh-Hoessini and I had a paper accepted to IEEE Cloud 2012 – one of the premier conferences on Cloud Computing. The paper is entitled “CloudMonitor: Profiling Power Usage” and discusses the CloudMonitor software and how it could be used to create an energy tariff for Cloud providers.

I’m very grateful to my supervisor Prof Ian Sommerville for encouraging me to go to the conference, to LSCITS for funding the trip and for Google for giving me the time off before I’ve even started!

More information on CloudMonitor along with a download link are on my website. The submitted paper is available on arXiv.org.

Aloha, Honolulu!

I’m going to be joining Google on June 1st for a summer internship!

I’ll be working with the Site Reliability Team in Dublin, Ireland. SRE are concerned with the operation, scalability and robustness of Google’s services. They are working on a scale that few other companies can match, so I feel very privileged that I’m going to be learning about the engineering challenges they face. My new manager said “the team is responsible for the internet as far as most of Europe is concerned”! Daunting!

I’m covered by the usual NDA’s but I believe I can say that I’ll be working on data centre monitoring so it seems to be very aligned with my research interests.

I spoke with a few friends who work there (one of whom recommended me) and was struck by their enthusiasm. They all said that the culture is extremely empowering for engineers and that they are looked after very well. I’m excited to experience it for myself!

A look at Google Dublin — very cool!

Since I arrived back from my Christmas Vacation in the States I’ve been working on two main projects for my PhD:

The first is a null hypothesis experiment to demonstrate one of the core principles of my work: that different mixes of the same workload can have a statistically significant affect on energy consumption.

Secondly, Ali and I have been doing work on exploiting CloudMonitor to profile applications so that deployment options can be evaluated and financial costs accurately calculated.

This involved two main components: creating an example web application and clients to stress it. Then measuring the resulting profile and using that to calculate costs, either through a public cloud cost analysis tool like ShopForCloud or by using electric rates to calculate the cost of power in local datacenters.

The resulting paper from this work has been submitted to IEEE Cloud 2012.

Stray observations:

1) The University currently plays 8.9p/kWh for electricity. This is a ridiculously cheap rate. British Gas currently charge me 25p/kWh at home.

2) I’ve been learning Python this month. It’s wonderful. It really is as Randall Monroe describes: http://xkcd.com/353/

3) I’m teaching again! It was something I really missed when I was away.

4) The new Formula 1 season is almost upon us. McLaren really does have the prettiest car this year. I hope it’s as fast as it looks. To know that I might have helped to develop it in some tiny way is an incredible feeling.

McLaren Applied Technologies

I recently completed a research fellowship with McLaren Applied Technologies working on developing ideas regarding resource aware scheduling systems. This placement gave me an excellent opportunity to learn about commercial research and development and gave me exposure to the unique pressures of working for a professional sports team.

McLaren is an incredible place to work – not only is the building a work of art, but the people are some of the most driven I have ever come across. I really hope that they can push forward and challenge for the titles this year. It was an honour to watch them work and learn about the inside track of my favourite F1 team.

While there I developed some basic software to allow for easy distribution of generic workload tasks in a compute network, named Workload-Dispatcher, which was open-sourced. Around the same time I also released another software project I had been working on – CloudMonitor. This utility was developed last year to investigate software based energy monitoring for Cloud Computing systems. I am currently in touch with teams at Bristol and CERN regarding its use in their work.

My amazing girlfriend bought me a “Silverstone Thrill Day” for my birthday which gave me a shot in a Formula Silverstone race car. Here is the on-board footage of the day. Not great conditions, starting to rain with heavy mist so the track was very slippy by the end and visibility was poor.

I started 3rd in line behind the pace car and finished 1st (over took both cars in front plus some back-markers without being overtaken myself).

We are behind the pace car for about the first 12 minutes of the video. Excuse the occasional stalling & awful gear changes! The clutch was a heavy beast!

Each year, IBM runs Extreme Blue, their premiere summer internship program, which asks teams of 4 students to develop a product over 12 weeks while providing fantastic access to senior staff and exposure to the media.

Extreme Blue was an invigorating experience of building a prototype project within an incubator inside IBM. My project involved network traffic analysis for identifying important business transactions. My team did very well with our project, resulting in submission of a patent application, for which I was the lead author. Once IBM’s legal department has prepared the full application to the US Patent office, it will be filed sometime in 2012. The project has been handed over and will continue with one of IBM’s internal software development teams.

I met some fantastic people during the internship and my team-mates were amongst the smartest and most enthusiastic individuals I’ve ever met. I would highly recommend it to anyone considering an internship.

Our team presenting at the Extreme Blue expo, Brussels, Belgium September 2011:

Here is an interview I did recently for the LSCITS website. I discuss briefly my research and the 2011 St Andrews Cloud Computing Summer School

Happy New Year to one and all.

For the first two months of 2011 I have been hard at work on my Cloud Monitor system, which will record and visualize information on the current resource consumption of a computing system (CPU, Memory, HDD, Network, etc) against the energy consumption (Watts, Current, Voltage, etc).

It is not live yet, but you can follow its progress at http://cloud.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/monitor/

PhD Review

At the end of January I also had my PhD review with my reviewer Dr. Alan Miller an my new second supervisor Dr. Alex Voss who is covering for Dr. Graham Kirby while he’s on research leave. For this I was required to produce a report and an updated poster. Both of which are available below:

Poster Link

18 Month Report

Cloud Audit

Derek Wang and I also took the opportunity to undertake a comprehensive audit of our current cloud systems, with the view to introducing new equipment in the coming weeks.

IBM

In January/February I was also fortunate enough to be invited to interview for a place on IBM’s premier internship program Extreme Blue. I detail my experience another blog post.

Since Summer 2010 I have been continuing my investigation in to the area of Virtual Machine performance and energy consumption on Private Cloud platforms.

I have refreshed my literature review to take on board comments given at the end of my first year review and to reflect my renewed focus on performance monitoring and work scheduling. The updated copy can be viewed at: http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~jamie/LiteratureReview.pdf

I have added references such as “VM Power and Provisioning” which is an example of work done in Software Power Management. They identify the challenges in metering the power used by Virtual Machines, as VMs cannot be monitored entirely in hardware through PDU measurements.

One concern I had at my last review was possible area overlap with Yi Yu, a situation which I have taken steps to address by collaborating with him on a power management platform using a new PDU which was jointly purchased by both our research groups.

I was invited to present my work at the LSCITS Postgraduate workshop based on the strength of an abstract submission. The talk was well received and prompted interesting discussions and a potential cross-site collaboration with a fellow LSCITS PhD student.

The presentation from this talk is here: Energy Aware Clouds and the subsequent paper here.

Alongside this document a poster is submitted which is an updated version of one presented at the SICSA DemoFEST event in November. That event was an excellent opportunity to network with industry members and has led to a number of possible collaborations.

On a side note, I am thankful to the school for providing me the opportunity to attend the Launch48 event in Edinburgh this past October, an event which left me with a fledgling startup business CompareTheUniversities.com.

“A man walks into a bar – a simple tale about a simple trick. But just who is conning who?”

Written & Directed by James Smith, Starring George Baker Baker, Gavin Harry Jackson and Felipe Schrieberg. Produced by Phil Pass & Executive Produced by Asani Mary Wilson. With thanks to Cat Hamilton, Annika Heeck, James McWalter and Rogue Productions.