Sky Computing
Towards Utility Computing for the Cloud
Sponsors
NEWS
September 1, 2022
Building a better ORAM with Oblix and Snoopy
Rather than tread this path towards ever-increasing program complexity as we try to hand-craft obfuscation into our memory access patterns through linear scanning, we’ve built a layer of abstraction around RAM access that utilizes higher-performing oblivious RAM (ORAM) techniques. We are inspired by the systems discussed in current academic literature, such as Path ORAM, Oblix, and Snoopy and grateful to the researchers who developed and shared them…
Sky project in the news: Piranha
All you have to do is bring your cryptographic protocols to Piranha and then program on top of it. That’s why we say it’s really a platform. In this study, we implemented three protocols on top of Piranha to show that it works, but you could implement any protocols you wanted on top of it and still get the same acceleration benefits…
How Machine Learning Became Useful: Reflecting on a Decade of Research
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become a critical piece of every aspect of life today. Yet 15 years ago, machine learning was a much smaller research discipline. How did a field born out of mathematics and theoretical computer science join forces with rapid innovation in data and computer systems to change the modern world? This is the question I have been asking myself as I reflect on my research career.
Events
October 21, 2022
Sky Seminar: Emmett Witchel – UT Austin
September 16, 2022
Sky Seminar: Yuan Yuan Tian – Microsoft Gray Systems Lab
September 9, 2022
Sky Seminar: John Wilkes – Google
Imagine some product team inside Google wants 100,000 CPU cores + RAM + flash + accelerators + disk in a couple of months. We need to decide where to put them, when; whether to deploy new machines, or re-purpose/reconfigure old ones; ensure we have enough power, cooling, networking, physical racks, data centers and (over longer a time-frame) wind power; cope with variances in delivery times from supply logistics hiccups; do multi-year cost-optimal placement+decisions in the face of literally thousands of different machine configurations; keep track of parts; schedule repairs, upgrades, and installations; and generally make all this happen behind the scenes at minimum cost. And then after breakfast, we get to dynamically allocate resources (on the small-minutes timescale) to the product groups that need them most urgently, accurately reflecting the cost (opex/capex) of all the machines and infrastructure we just deployed, and monitoring and controlling the datacenter power and cooling systems to achieve minimum overheads – even as we replace all of these on the fly. This talk will highlight some of the exciting problems we’re working on inside Google to ensure we can supply the needs of an organization that is experiencing (literally) exponential growth in computing capacity.
September 2, 2022
Sky Seminar – DBSP: Automatic Incremental View Maintenance for Rich Query Languages with Mihai Budiu and Leonid Ryzhyk
Incremental view maintenance has been for a long time a central problem in database theory. Many solutions have been proposed for restricted classes of database languages, such as the relational algebra, or Datalog. These techniques do not naturally generalize to richer languages. In this work we give a general solution to this problem in 3 steps: (1) we describe a simple but expressive language called DBSP for describing computations over data streams; (2) we give a general algorithm for solving the incremental view maintenance problem for arbitrary DBSP programs, and (3) we show how to model many rich database query languages (including the full relational queries, grouping and aggregation, monotonic and non-monotonic recursion, and streaming aggregation) using DBSP. As a consequence, we obtain efficient incremental view maintenance techniques for all these rich languages This is joint work with Val Tannen from University of Pennsylvania, Frank McSherry from Materialize.io
Publications
September 8, 2022
Reliable Transactions in Serverless-Edge Architecture
Published: ICDE’23 (IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering)
Authors Suyash Gupta, Sajjad Rahnama, Erik Linsenmayer, Faisal Nawab, Mohammad Sadoghi
Reliable Transactions in Serverless-Edge Architecture
Modern edge applications demand novel solutions where edge applications do not have to rely on a single cloud provider (which cannot be in the vicinity of every edge device) or dedicated edge servers (which cannot scale as clouds) for processing compute-intensive tasks. A recent computing philosophy, Sky computing, proposes giving each user ability to select between available cloud providers.
In this paper, we present our serverless-edge co-design, which extends the Sky computing vision. In our serverless-edge co-design, we expect edge devices to collaborate and spawn required number of serverless functions. This raises several key challenges: (1) how will this collaboration take place, (2) what if some edge devices are compromised, and (3) what if a selected cloud provider is malicious. Hence, we design ServerlessBFT, the first protocol to guarantee Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) transactional flow between edge devices and serverless functions. We present an exhaustive list of attacks and their solutions on our serverless-edge co-design. Further, we extensively benchmark our architecture on a variety of parameters.
August 8, 2022
Jiffy: elastic far-memory for stateful serverless analytics
A Khandelwal, Y Tang, R Agarwal, A Akella, I Stoica Proceedings of the Seventeenth European Conference on Computer Systems (Eurosys’22)
August 8, 2022
The Sky Above The Clouds
Technology ecosystems often undergo significant transformations as they mature. For example, telephony, the Internet, and PCs all started with a single provider, but in the United States each is now served by a competitive market that uses comprehensive and universal technology standards to provide compatibility. This white paper presents our view on how the cloud ecosystem, barely over fifteen years old, could evolve as it matures.
Sky Computing Story
Berkeley’s computer science division has an ongoing tradition of 5-year collaborative research labs. Recent labs included the AMPLAB (ended in 2016) and the Rise Lab. These labs have had significant impact in both academia and industry. Past labs publish their research at top conferences in systems, databases, and machine learning. On the industrial side, AmpLab and RiseLab fostered several successful startups (Databricks, Opaque, Ponder, Anyscale, to name a few). We are excited to announce the Berkeley Sky Computing Lab where we will strike to make cloud computing a true commodity.
Context
The Sky Computing Lab represents the next chapter of data-intensive systems research at Berkeley. Recent years have seen the explosion of cloud computing. Applications are moving their data and computation to the cloud; on-premise services are dying. In doing so, companies have to make difficult choices between the myriad of cloud providers, each with different services or hardware. Lock-in, whether through artificial migration costs, legal constraints or engineering baggage is real. In the Sky Computing Lab, we will leverage distributed systems, programming languages, security, and machine learning to decouple the services that a company wants to implement from the choice of a specific cloud. Much like the Internet today, cloud computing should be an undifferentiated commodity. Applications should run seamlessly on any or multiple clouds.
Mission
Our mission in the Sky Computing Lab is to transform the cloud into an undifferentiated commodity and ease application burden. As in previous labs, we’re all in — working on everything from basic research to software development, all in the Berkeley tradition of open publication and open source software. Our founding team consists of experts in distributed systems, machine learning, security and programming languages. We’ll use this space to lay out our ideas and progress as we go.
Commitment to Diversity
Sky Computing is guided by Berkeley’s Principles of Community and is committed to providing a safe and caring research environment for every member of our community. We believe that a diverse student body, faculty, and staff are essential to the open exchange of ideas that Sky Computing Lab is founded on.
Our head is in the cloud. We are heading for the SKY.
Natacha Crooks – Featured Project
Basil
Basil explores the design of SQL databases with high integrity and decentralized trust. How can traditional functionality like ACID transactions and SQL queries be efficiently implemented when trust is decentralized among n distinct parties, of which a subject can misbehave.
Joseph Gonzalez – Featured Project
RALF
We are exploring the design of feature stores: the emerging class of data systems that bridge model development, training, and inference. Features stores compute, store, and managing the data and derived features at the heart of ML powered applications.
Raluca Ada Popa – Featured Project
MC2
MC2 is a platform for running secure analytics and machine learning on encrypted data. With MC2, organizations can safely upload their confidential data to the cloud in encrypted form and securely compute analytics and machine learning without exposing the unencrypted data to the cloud provider. MC2 also enables secure collaboration among multiple organizations, where the data owners can use the platform to jointly analyze their collective data without revealing their individual data to each other.
Ion Stoica – Featured Project
SKYPLANE
Cloud applications are increasingly distributing data across multiple regions and cloud providers in response to privacy regulations, to take advantage of specialized hardware, and to prevent vendor lock-in. Unfortunately, wide-area bulk data transfers are often slow and expensive due to egress fees. This work aims to reduce both the latency and the cost of inter-cloud bulk transfer by using a variety of techniques, including overlay routing, multiple instances, multiple TCP connections, and taking advantage of different network tiers. Together, these techniques allow Skyplane to significantly improve object transfer throughput and lower the costs.
Koushik Sen – Featured Project
FuzzFactory
FuzzFactory is domain-specific fuzz testing tool that generalizes coverage-guided fuzzing to domain-specific testing goals. FuzzFactory allows users to guide the fuzzer’s search process without having to modify the core search algorithm.