David Lo
David is a performance engineer at Google. His interests include energy efficiency and resource isolation for latency-critical workloads. He joined Google after graduating from Stanford with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. David also received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.
Authored Publications
Sort By
Preview abstract
Cloud applications are increasingly shifting from large monolithic services to complex graphs of loosely-coupled microservices. Despite the advantages of modularity and elasticity microservices offer, they also complicate cluster management and performance debugging, as dependencies between tiers introduce backpressure and cascading QoS violations.
We present Sage, a machine learning-driven root cause analysis system for interactive cloud microservices. Sage leverages unsupervised ML models to circumvent the overhead of trace labeling, captures the impact of dependencies between microservices to determine the root cause of unpredictable performance online, and applies corrective actions to recover a cloud service’s QoS. In experiments on both dedicated local clusters and large clusters on Google Compute Engine we show that Sage consistently achieves over 93% accuracy in correctly identifying the root cause of QoS violations, and improves performance predictability.
View details
Autonomous Warehouse-Scale Computers
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Design Automation Conference 2020, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY United States
Preview abstract
Modern Warehouse-Scale Computers (WSCs), composed of many generations of servers and a myriad of domain specific accelerators, are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. Meanwhile, WSC workloads are also becoming incredibly diverse with different communication patterns, latency requirements, and service level objectives (SLOs). Insufficient understanding of the interactions between workload characteristics and the underlying machine architecture leads to resource over-provisioning, thereby significantly impacting the utilization of WSCs.
We present Autonomous Warehouse-Scale Computers, a new WSC design that leverages machine learning techniques and automation to improve job scheduling, resource management, and hardware-software co-optimization to address the increasing heterogeneity in WSC hardware and workloads. Our new design introduces two new layers in the WSC stack, namely: (a) a Software-Defined Server (SDS) Abstraction Layer which redefines the hardware-software boundary and provides greater control of the hardware to higher layers of the software stack through stable abstractions; and (b) a WSC Efficiency Layer which regularly monitors the resource usage of workloads on different hardware types, autonomously quantifies the performance sensitivity of workloads to key system configurations, and continuously improves scheduling decisions and hardware resource QoS policies to maximize cluster level performance. Our new WSC design has been successfully deployed across all WSCs at Google for several years now. The new WSC design improves throughput of workloads (by 7-10%, on
average), increases utilization of hardware resources (up to 2x), and reduces performance variance for critical workloads (up to 25%).
View details
Thunderbolt: Throughput-Optimized, Quality-of-Service-Aware Power Capping at Scale
Shaohong Li
Sreekumar Kodakara
14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 20), {USENIX} Association (2020), pp. 1241-1255
Preview abstract
As the demand for data center capacity continues to grow, hyperscale providers have used power oversubscription to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Power oversubscription requires power capping systems to smooth out the spikes that risk overloading power equipment by throttling workloads. Modern compute clusters run latency-sensitive serving and throughput-oriented batch workloads on the same servers, provisioning resources to ensure low latency for the former while using the latter to achieve high server utilization. When power capping occurs, it is desirable to maintain low latency for serving tasks and throttle the throughput of batch tasks. To achieve this, we seek a system that can gracefully throttle batch workloads and has task-level quality-of-service (QoS) differentiation.
In this paper we present Thunderbolt, a hardware-agnostic power capping system that ensures safe power oversubscription while minimizing impact on both long-running throughput-oriented tasks and latency-sensitive tasks. It uses a two-threshold, randomized unthrottling/multiplicative decrease control policy to ensure power safety with minimized performance degradation. It leverages the Linux kernel's CPU bandwidth control feature to achieve task-level QoS-aware throttling. It is robust even in the face of power telemetry unavailability. Evaluation results at the node and cluster levels demonstrate the system's responsiveness, effectiveness for reducing power, capability of QoS differentiation, and minimal impact on latency and task health. We have deployed this system at scale, in multiple production clusters. As a result, we enabled power oversubscription gains of 9%--25%, where none was previously possible.
View details
Kelp: QoS for Accelerators in Machine Learning Platforms
Haishan Zhu
Rama Govindaraju
Mattan Erez
International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (2019)
Preview abstract
Development and deployment of machine learning (ML) accelerators in Warehouse Scale Computers (WSCs) demand significant capital investments and engineering efforts. However, even though heavy computation can be offloaded to the accelerators, applications often depend on the host system for various supporting tasks. As a result, contention on host resources, such as memory bandwidth, can significantly discount the performance and efficiency gains of accelerators. The impact of performance interference is further amplified in distributed learning for large models.
In this work, we study the performance of four production machine learning workloads on three accelerator platforms. Our experiments show that these workloads are highly sensitive to host memory bandwidth contention, which can cause 40% average performance degradation when left unmanaged. To tackle this problem, we design and implement Kelp, a software runtime that isolates high priority accelerated ML tasks from memory resource interference. We evaluate Kelp with both production and artificial aggressor workloads, and compare its effectiveness with previously proposed solutions. Our evaluation shows that Kelp is effective in mitigating performance degradation of the accelerated tasks, and improves performance by 24% on average. Compared to previous work, Kelp reduces performance degradation of ML tasks by 7% and improves system efficiency by 17%. Our results further expose opportunities in future architecture designs.
View details
Improving Resource Efficiency at Scale with Heracles
Rama Govindaraju
Christos Kozyrakis
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 34 (2016), 6:1-6:33
Preview abstract
User-facing, latency-sensitive services, such as websearch, underutilize their computing resources during daily periods of low traffic. Reusing those resources for other tasks is rarely done in production services since the contention for shared resources can cause latency spikes that violate the service-level objectives of latency-sensitive tasks. The resulting under-utilization hurts both the affordability and energy efficiency of large-scale datacenters. With the slowdown in technology scaling caused by the sunsetting of Moore’s law, it becomes important to address this opportunity.
We present Heracles, a feedback-based controller that enables the safe colocation of best-effort tasks alongside a latency-critical service. Heracles dynamically manages multiple hardware and software isolation mechanisms, such as CPU, memory, and network isolation, to ensure that the latency-sensitive job meets latency targets while maximizing the resources given to best-effort tasks. We evaluate Heracles using production latency-critical and batch workloads from Google and demonstrate average server utilizations of 90% without latency violations across all the load and colocation scenarios that we evaluated.
View details
Heracles: Improving Resource Efficiency at Scale
Rama Govindaraju
Christos Kozyrakis
Proceedings of the 42th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (2015)
Preview abstract
User-facing, latency-sensitive services, such as websearch, underutilize their computing resources during daily periods of low traffic. Reusing those resources for other tasks is rarely done in production services since the contention for shared resources can cause latency spikes that violate the service-level objectives of latency-sensitive tasks. The resulting under-utilization hurts both the affordability and energy-efficiency of large-scale datacenters. With technology scaling slowing down, it becomes important to address this opportunity.
We present Heracles, a feedback-based controller that enables the safe colocation of best-effort tasks alongside a latency-critical service. Heracles dynamically manages multiple hardware and software isolation mechanisms, such as CPU, memory, and network isolation, to ensure that the latency-sensitive job meets latency targets while maximizing the resources given to best-effort tasks. We evaluate Heracles using production latency-critical and batch workloads from Google and demonstrate average server utilizations of 90% without latency violations across all the load and colocation scenarios that we evaluated.
View details
Towards Energy Proportionality for Large-Scale Latency-Critical Workloads
Rama Govindaraju
Luiz André Barroso
Christos Kozyrakis
Proceedings of the 41th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ACM (2014)
Preview abstract
Reducing the energy footprint of warehouse-scale computer (WSC) systems is key to their affordability, yet difficult to achieve in practice. The lack of energy proportionality of typical WSC hardware and the fact that important workloads (such as search) require all servers to remain up regardless of traffic intensity renders existing power management techniques ineffective at reducing WSC energy use.
We present PEGASUS, a feedback-based controller that significantly improves the energy proportionality of WSC systems, as demonstrated by a real implementation in a Google search cluster. PEGASUS uses request latency statistics to dynamically adjust server power management limits in a fine-grain manner, running each server just fast enough to meet global service-level latency objectives. In large cluster experiments, PEGASUS reduces power consumption by up to 20%. We also estimate that a distributed version of PEGASUS can nearly double these savings.
View details
