Optimizing Cloud AI Platforms: Resource Allocation and Market Design

Citation

Su, Yu (2021) Optimizing Cloud AI Platforms: Resource Allocation and Market Design. Dissertation (Ph.D.), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/bc2t-er54. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:06072021-172842077

Abstract

The numerous applications of data-driven algorithms and tools across diverse industries have led to tremendous successes in recent years. As the volume of massive data that is created, collected, and consumed continues to grow, there are many new imposed challenges faced by today's cloud AI platforms that support the deployment of machine learning algorithms on a large scale. In this thesis, we tackle the emerging challenges within cloud AI systems and beyond by adopting approaches from the fields of resource allocation and market design.

First, we propose a new scheduler, Generalized Earliest Time First (GETF), and provide the provable, worst-case approximation guarantees for the goals of minimizing both makespan and total weighted completion time of tasks with precedence constraints on related machines with machine-dependent communication times. These two results address long-standing open problems. Further, we adopt the classic speed scaling function to model power consumption and use mean response time to measure the performance. We propose the concept of pseudo-size to quantify importance of tasks and design a family of two-stage scheduling frameworks based on the approximation of pseudo-size. Assuming a good approximation of pseudo-size, we are able to provide the first provable bound of a linear combination of performance and energy goals under this setting.

Second, we study the design of mechanisms for data acquisition in settings with information leakage and verifiable data. We provide the first characterization of an optimal mechanism for data acquisition if agents are concerned about privacy and their data is correlated with each other. Additionally, the mechanism allows, for the first time, a trade-off between the bias and variance of the estimator. Transitioning from the data market into the energy market, we propose a new pricing scheme, which is applicable to general non-convex costs, and allows using general parametric pricing functions. Optimizing for the quantities and the price parameters simultaneously, and the ability to use general parametric pricing functions allows our scheme to find prices that are typically economically more efficient and less discriminatory than those of the existing schemes while still supporting a competitive equilibrium. In addition, we supplement the proposed method with a computationally efficient polynomial-time approximation algorithm, which can be used to approximate the optimal quantities and prices for general non-convex cost functions.

Thesis Files