Sky Computing
Towards Utility Computing for the Cloud
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News
October 19, 2022
Interview: ACM features Raluca Popa on “People of ACM Profiles”
October 5, 2022
Congrats to Shishir Patil for the POET project being featured in IEEE Spectrum!
September 29, 2022
Gateway groundbreaking brings new opportunity for computing, data science
“It’s not only about data, it’s what you’re going to do with the data,” said Stoica, adding that society is only beginning to see the impact of big data in many fields.
Events
November 4, 2022
Sky Seminar: Zhifeng Chen – Google Research “Some scalability challenges in machine learning”
Speaker: Zhifeng Chen Location: Soda 430-438, Woz Lounge Date: November 4, 2022, Friday Time: 12-1 pm PST Title: Some scalability challenges in machine learning Abstract: Over the past decade, AI presented us with numerous amazing results and had a huge impact on our lives. These achievements were results of advancements in the areas of algorithms, data and hardware. Scalability is a common theme in the development of these areas. In this talk, I will share some scalability challenges faced by my colleagues and myself in Google and what we have built to address them. I will also discuss some challenges we are currently facing and research directions that may help solve them. Bio: Dr. Zhifeng Chen is a distinguished engineer in Google Research, Brain. His recent work focuses on scalable machine learning systems and algorithms. He collaborates with many machine learning researchers and is interested in areas such as machine translation, speech recognition and synthesis, 3D perception, and large language models. He helped build several Google’s infrastructure software systems, including TensorFlow, Zanzibar, and BigTable, etc.
October 28, 2022
Sky Seminar: Fredrik Kjolstad – Stanford
October 21, 2022
Sky Seminar: Emmett Witchel – UT Austin
October 19, 2022
Sky Camp 2022
Sky Computing will be holding our first annual camp event with talks and tutorials on October 19, 2022, in person at Banatao Auditorium on the UC Berkeley Campus. Visit the website for more details or email skycampATberkeley.edu.
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 RISELab. 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. Ralf is a feature store for rapidly changing data. Ralf incrementally propagates raw data changes to derived feature tables which are queryable by downstream applications such as model training and inference.
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.