Position: Postdoctoral Research Associate

Current Institution: Princeton University

Abstract:
Viability of Cloud Services

Cloud computing, due to its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) nature, has revolutionized the way that computing resources are utilized: they are generally virtualized in units of instances associated with remote virtual machines with specified amounts of CPU, memory, storage, and other attributes, and users can then benefit from renting these instances by the hour, eliminating setup and maintenance costs for the physical machines. With the growth of cloud services, cloud providers face an increasingly complicated problem of allocating their resources to different users: user demands are highly dynamic as jobs are submitted and completed at different times, making it difficult for the cloud providers to maintain a consistent quality of experience (QoE). These resource allocations must take into account both available capacity within datacenter networks as well as individual jobs’ required instance hours and interruptibility, imposing new types of constraints on the operator’s ability to route jobs among its datacenters and manage fluctuating user demands. We approach the viable solutions for cloud services by using the price incentive to shape user behavior. In the talk, I will present an auction-based spot pricing (that is published at SIGCOMM 2015) and the viability of a cloud virtual service provider (that is published at SIGMETRICS 2016).

Bio:

Liang Zheng is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University. She received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2015, and the bachelor’s degree in software engineering from Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, in 2011. Her research interests are primarily in using data analytics to understand user behavior in computing/networked systems, particularly from an economic perspective. She received the First-class Student Research Excellence Award from the College of Science and Engineering in 2014, and was a Finalist of Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship in 2013.