Title: Profit Maximization in Cloud Computing

Speaker: Keqin Li, SUNY Distinguished Professor, State University of New York

Time: 9:30, Monday, June 11, 2012

Venue: Lecture room, 3rd Floor, Building 5#, State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract:

As cloud computing becomes more and more popular, understanding the economics of cloud computing becomes critically important. To maximize the profit, a service provider should understand both service charges and business costs, and how they are determined by the characteristics of the applications and the configuration of a multiserver system. The problem of optimal multiserver configuration for profit maximization in a cloud computing environment is studied. Our pricing model takes such factors into considerations as the amount of a service, the workload of an application environment, the configuration of a multiserver system, the service level agreement, the satisfaction of a consumer, the quality of a service, the penalty of a low quality service, the cost of renting, the cost of energy consumption, and a service provider’s margin and profit. Our approach is to treat a multiserver system as an M/M/m queueing model, such that our optimization problem can be formulated and solved analytically. Two server speed and power consumption models are considered, namely, the idle-speed model and the constant-speed model. The probability density function of the waiting time of a newly arrived service request is derived. The expected service charge to a service request is calculated. The expected net business gain in one unit of time is obtained. Numerical calculations of the optimal server size and the optimal server speed are demonstrated. The work presented in this talk is a joint effort of Junwei Cao, Kai Hwang, Keqin Li, and Albert Y. Zomaya.

Bio:

Dr. Keqin Li is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of computer science in the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is also an Intellectual Ventures endowed visiting chair professor at the National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His research interests are mainly in design and analysis of algorithms, parallel and distributed computing, and computer networking. He has contributed extensively to processor allocation and resource management; design and analysis of sequential/parallel, deterministic/probabilistic, and approximation algorithms; parallel and distributed computing systems performance analysis, prediction, and evaluation; job scheduling, task dispatching, and load balancing in heterogeneous distributed systems; dynamic tree embedding and randomized load distribution in static networks; parallel computing using optical interconnections; dynamic location management in wireless communication networks; routing and wavelength assignment in optical networks; energy-efficient computing and communication. His current research interests include lifetime maximization in sensor networks, file sharing in peer-to-peer systems, power management and performance optimization, and cloud computing. Dr. Li has published over 240 journal articles, book chapters, and research papers in refereed international conference proceedings. He has received several Best Paper Awards for his highest quality work. Dr. Li has served in various capacities for numerous international conferences as general chair, program chair, workshop chair, track chair, and steering/advisory/award/program committee member. He is currently on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, and Optimization Letters.