Decentralized control in large-scale fog computing infrastructures

Publié le
Equipe
Date de début de thèse (si connue)
October 2021
Lieu
Rennes
Unité de recherche
IRISA - UMR 6074
Description du sujet de la thèse

The infrastructures which host most of the large Internet applications are becoming increasingly distributed. To deliver excellent performance to their users while reducing the usage of wide-area networking resources, fog computing extends the traditional cloud computing model with additional resources located close the the end-user devices [1].

Fog platforms have very different geographical distribution compared to traditional clouds. Classical datacenter clouds are composed of many reliable and powerful machines located in a very small number of data centers and interconnected by very high-speed networks. In contrast, fogs are composed of a very large number of points-of-presence with a couple of weak and potentially unreliable servers, interconnected with each other by commodity long-distance networks.

Although fog computing supports the broad distribution of compute and storage resources [2], all the current fog platforms have a single node (or a small group of co-located nodes) which take care of keeping track of the worker nodes, centralizing monitoring information, choosing which resources should be assigned to which application, monitoring the running applications etc. This means that the whole platform is being controlled by a single administrative entity which has full power over all the worker nodes. As an example, the recently proposed Kubernetes Federations make use of centralized control over potentially distributed resources [3]. This creates issues related to the scalability of the platform, its resilience properties in the presence of (temporary) failures, and it requires that all the resources are owned and controlled by a single administrative entity.

The objective of this thesis is to study how the control functions of a fog computing can be decentralized and how a fog platform may be composed of large numbers of independent sub-systems that are potentially owned by independent entities. This will require the PhD student to list all the centralized control functions in a large-scale infrastructure such as Kubernetes, identify the most critical ones, and devise distributed or decentralized algorithms to re-design their organization in a more scalable and resilient manner. One interesting direction to address this problem -- which remains to be (in)validated by the doctoral student is to design collaborative yet independent sub-systems which autonomously organize themselves to provide the required functions based on the principles of peer-to-peer overlays.

This project will be conducted within the IRISA Myriads team which is working on the design of innovative infrastructures and middleware for future fog computing platforms [4]. The team leader, Guillaume Pierre, is also the coordinator of the FogGuru European project [5].

 

Required qualifications:

  • A master degree in distributed systems and/or Cloud computing.
  • Excellent programming skills in Linux environments.
  • Excellent communication and writing skills.
  • Good command of English.
  • Knowledge of the following technologies is not mandatory but will be considered as a plus:
    • Cloud resource scheduling
    • Distributed container systems: Kubernetes, Docker Swarm.
    • Single-board computers such as Raspberry PI
    • Python and shell scripting
    • Revision control systems: git, svn.
    • Linux distributions: Debian, Ubuntu.

Note that knowledge of French is *not* required for this position.

Contract duration: 3 years, full time.

Start date: October 2020.

Location: Rennes is the capital city of Britanny, in the western part of France. It is easy to reach thanks to the high-speed train line to Paris. Rennes is a lively city and a major center for higher education and research. The job will take place within the INRIA/IRISA research center, which is internationally recognized for its research in the domain of information and communication sciences.

Bibliographie

[1] F. Bonomi et al., "Fog Computing and its Role in the Internet of things", in Proc. ACM MCC, 2012. https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2012/paper/mcc/p13.pdf

[2] Voilà: Tail-Latency-Aware Fog Application Replicas Autoscaler. Ali Fahs, Guillaume Pierre and Erik Elmroth. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Modelling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), Nov 2020. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02932484

[3] Kubernetes Federation project. https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubefed/blob/master/README.md

[4] Myriads INRIA/IRISA team. https://team.inria.fr/myriads/

[5] FogGuru: Training the Next Generation of European Fog Computing Experts. H2020 ITN EID Marie Skłodowska-Curie project #765452. http://www.fogguru.eu/

 

Liste des encadrants et encadrantes de thèse

Nom, Prénom
Guillaume Pierre
Type d'encadrement
Directeur.trice de thèse
Unité de recherche
UMR 6074
Contact·s
Mots-clés
fog computing, cloud computing, decentralization, resource management