Server Control

Maria Kihl

Performance modeling and control of server systems

This research area is a collaboration with between the Dept. of Electrical and Information Technology and the Dept. of Automatic Control. The research is aimed at advancing the state of the art in control oriented modelling and control design of server systems by combining the scientific expertise from the telecommunication and the control communities. Important components in this research field are queuing theory, system identification, real-time systems and non-linear control theory. These fields have since long been well established research areas. However, the integration of this research with application to control of server systems gives raise to fundamental and challenging questions on how to e.g., combine and analyse discrete-event and continuous time flow models. The problems are of large theoretical as well as practical relevance in control of computing systems.

The main objectives of the research are:

· To use system identification and control theoretic methods to find good stochastic models and reliable state estimators for traffic and server systems

· Analyse the fundamental mechanisms in the combination of discrete-event based server systems and real-time control algorithms.

· To develop an experimental platform for experimental evaluation of control mechanisms

The research is currently funded by

· Lund Center for for Control of Complex Engineering Systems (LCCC)

· The Swedish Research Council: “Resource Allocation and Control of Distributed Service Management Systems”