Jing Xu PhD Student, Graduate Research Assistant Advanced Computing and Information Systems Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Florida P.O. Box 116200, 339 Larsen Hall Gainesville, FL, 32611-6200 Tel: (352)392-4964 Fax: (352)392-5040 Email: jxu97 AT ufl DOT edu

INTERESTS

PROJECTS

• Profit-driven Autonomic Resource Management in Virtualized Data Centers
  In data centers, virtualization provides the opportunity of carving individual physical servers into multiple virtual containers that can be run and managed separately. A key challenge is the simultaneous on-demand provisioning of shared resources to virtual containers and the management of their capacities to meet service quality targets at the least cost. We proposed a two-level resource management system with local controllers at the virtual-container level and a global controller at the resource-pool level. Autonomic resource allocation is realized through the interaction of the local and global controllers. A novelty of the controller designs is their use of fuzzy logic to efficiently and robustly deal with the complexity of the virtualized data center and the uncertainties of the dynamically changing workloads. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed resource management system can significantly reduce resource consumption while still achieving application performance targets.

• Cooperative Autonomic Managers in Dynamic Distributed Systems
  This project focuses on distributed-system self-management that arises from interaction among the autonomic elements deployed in the system. An overlay network is formed by dynamically creating neighborhoods of autonomic elements. Information sharing among neighbors allows local access to global information as needed for controlling, monitoring and optimizing performance of applications. The approached has been tested by implementing a decentralized autonomic system (DAVAM) consisting of multiple autonomic virtual application managers developed for used in the In-VIGO Grid-computing middleware. The experimental evaluation showed that the random and decentralized nature of the system yields desirable properties, including efficiency, robustness, self-organization and adaptivity under a highly dynamic environment.

• Autonomic Virtual Application Management in the In-VIGO System
  This project designs application-centric middleware components to automatically recover from failures and dynamically adapt to grid environments with changing resource availabilities, improving fault-tolerance and performance. The key components are a global per-application execution history and an autonomic component that tracks the performance of a job on a grid resource against predictions based on the application execution history, to guide rescheduling decisions. Performance models of unmodified applications built using their execution history are used to predict failure as well as poor performance. A prototype of the proposed approach, an Autonomic Virtual Application Manager (AVAM), has been implemented in the context of the In-VIGO grid environment and its effectiveness has been evaluated for CPU-intensive applications.

• In-VIGO Grid-computing middleware
  In-VIGO project provides a distributed environment where multiple application instances can coexist in virtual or physical resources, such that clients are unaware of the complexities inherent to grid computing. Its distinctive feature is the extensive use of virtualization technology for the creation of dynamic pools of virtual resources that can be aggregated on-demand. I contributed to the development of scientific parallel applications on In-VIGO system to provide reliable and high performance on Grid resources.

• Study of Parallel Computing on Physical and Virtual Clusters In this project, a virtual cluster consisting of a collection of classic virtual machines is build on a physical cluster (IBM Cluster 1300). We test and analyze the performance difference between the physical and virtual cluster using various parallel applications.

PUBLICATIONS

• Jing Xu, Ming Zhao, José A. B. Fortes, Robert Carpenter, Mazin Yousif, “On the Use of Fuzzy Modeling in Virtualized Data Center Management”, in Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Autonomic Computing, June 2007 (ICAC 2007). [Paper] [Presentation]

• Ming Zhao, Jing Xu, Renato J. Figueiredo, “Towards Autonomic Grid Data Management with Virtualized Distributed File Systems”, In Proceedings of The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2006), June 2006. [Paper]

• Jing Xu, Sumalatha Adabala, José A. B. Fortes, “Towards Autonomic Virtual Application Manager in In-VIGO system”, in Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Autonomic Computing, June 2005 (ICAC 2005). [Paper] [Presentation]

• Jing Xu, Ming Zhao, José A. B. Fortes, “Towards System-level Autonomic Computing with Communicating Autonomic Virtual Application Managers”, Technical Report.

• Zhen-An Liu, Jing Xu, Object-Oriented Programming Design, Science Press, China, 2001.

• Zhen-An Liu, Yang Ming, Jing Xu, “Hardware Design for Long-Distance Digital Speech Communication System”, Journal of Microcomputer Development, China, March, 2001.