Talk title : Scheduling Complex Real-Time Applications in the Cloud – Trends and Challenges

Abstract : The advent of cloud computing has offered virtually unlimited computing resources on a pay-as-you go basis to users for the deployment of their complex computationally intensive applications.
However, cloud computing involves many important issues that must be addressed in order to exploit its full potential. This is mainly due to the continuously increasing number of cloud users and applications and the heterogeneity and scale of the resources. Effective resource allocation, job scheduling, cost, quality of service, availability and reliability are some of the issues which require attention for good performance and users’ satisfaction. Furthermore, energy conservation is a hot topic that is gaining growing attention as it is essential for ensuring the future success of cloud computing.
Complex job scheduling in large scale distributed systems is a challenging problem. Particularly important in cloud computing is the effective scheduling of complex real-time applications, considering timeliness along with energy conservation. Therefore, energy efficient scheduling strategies are required ensuring that the deadlines of complex jobs will be met.
Recently, due to the increasing number of Internet of Things applications, fog computing appeared as a new paradigm beyond cloud computing. Real-time applications should be appropriately assigned to resources in both the fog and cloud layers, taking into account the communication and computational characteristics of each individual application.
In this talk we will present research covering various concepts on scheduling complex real-time applications in cloud systems and we will provide future research directions in the cloud computing area.

Biography : Helen Karatza is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, where she teaches courses in the postgraduate and undergraduate level, and supervises doctoral and postdoctoral research. Dr. Karatza's research interests include Computer Systems Modeling and Simulation, Performance Evaluation, Fog and Cloud Computing, Energy Efficiency in Large Scale Distributed Systems, Resource Allocation and Scheduling and Real-time Distributed Systems. Dr. Karatza has authored or co-authored over 220 technical papers and book chapters including five papers that earned best paper awards at international conferences. She is senior member of IEEE, ACM and SCS, and she served as an elected member of the Board of Directors at Large of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International. She served as Chair and Keynote Speaker in International Conferences. Dr. Karatza is the Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier Journal “Simulation Modeling Practice and Theory” and Senior Associate Editor of the “Journal of Systems and Software” of Elsevier. She was Editor-in-Chief of “Simulation Transactions of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International” and Associate Editor of “ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation”. She served as Guest Editor of Special Issues in International Journals. More info about her activities/publications can be found in http://agent.csd.auth.gr/~karatza/