ECE PhD Dissertation Defense: Apoorve Mohan

PhD Dissertation Defense: Rethinking the Choice between Static and Dynamic Provisioning for Centralized Bare-Metal Deployments

Apoorve Mohan

Location: Zoom Link

Abstract: Technological inertia leads many organizations to continue to employ static provisioning strategies for bare-metal deployments. This results in architectural and runtime inefficiencies. However, most performance and security-sensitive organizations currently employ static provisioning strategies to run and manage their workloads on physical servers (also known as bare-metal servers). This thesis demonstrates how recent technological advances enable dynamic provisioning strategies to improve aggregate bare-metal resource efficiency in centralized bare-metal deployments. Conceptually, this dissertation has four parts. First, it introduces a new system architecture for dynamic bare-metal provisioning. The proposed architecture reduces overhead and operational complexity and improves fault tolerance and performance. To achieve these improvements, it decouples the provisioned state from the bare-metal servers. Second, the thesis identifies the performance and operational issues due to intrusive software introspection strategies employed in existing bare-metal deployments. We present a dynamic bare-metal provisioning-based system to enable non-intrusive software introspection of bare-metal deployments to mitigate these issues. Many organizations have realized the cost benefits of consolidating their computing infrastructure over managing multiple, relatively smaller compute facilities.

Over the past decade, virtual infrastructure solutions have become the obvious choice in consolidated (i.e., single-tenant managed or centralized) deployments for many organizations due to the scalability, availability, and cost benefits it offers. However, most performance and security-sensitive organizations such as medical companies and hospitals, financial institutions, federal agencies run their workloads directly on physical (i.e., bare-metal) infrastructure. They are unwilling to tolerate the performance unpredictability and security risks due to co-location and performance overhead or vulnerabilities due to a large code base of the complex virtualization stack. In addition, even if an organization uses virtual infrastructure, bare-metal infrastructure is used to set up virtualization software stack and when their workloads require direct and exclusive access to hardware components (e.g., InfiniBand, RAID, FPGAs, GPUs) that are difficult to virtualize. Such organizations invest enormous sums of money to buy or rent bare-metal servers and set up and manage bare-metal clusters. Thus, it is imperative that these organizations efficiently operate and utilize the bare-metal clusters they set up to maximize their investment returns. However, despite the technological advances over the past decade, organizations continually employ static provisioning strategies in bare-metal deployments that contribute to poor aggregate bare-metal resource efficiency. Thesis Statement: This thesis demonstrates how dynamic provisioning can mitigate observed inefficiencies in centralized bare-metal deployments. The proposed dynamic provisioning strategies leverages existing storage disaggregation and fault-tolerance technologies to improve aggregate bare-metal resource efficiency. By applying it to four real-world scenarios, this thesis demonstrates the effectiveness of dynamic provisioning.