Zhiyuan Yao
PhD Student
After his studies on Aircraft Design and Engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology, Zhiyuan Yao completed his MSc&T in Internet of Things at École Polytechnique, where he focused on computer networking and distributed systems. His Master’s research focused on applying machine learning techniques and distributed algorithms to resource allocation optimisation in data centre networks.
Zhiyuan is now undertaking an industrial PhD under the joint supervision of Mark Townsley (Cisco) and Thomas Clausen (École polytechnique)
Latest Posts Mentioning Zhiyuan
Zhiyuan’s Publications
2021
Yao, Zhiyuan; Ding, Zihan; Clausen, Thomas Heide
Reinforced Workload Distribution Fairness Inproceedings Forthcoming
In: Machine Learning for Systems at 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021), Forthcoming.
@inproceedings{yao2021reinforced,
title = {Reinforced Workload Distribution Fairness},
author = {Zhiyuan Yao and Zihan Ding and Thomas Heide Clausen},
url = {https://www.thomasclausen.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2111.00008-1.pdf},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-12-01},
urldate = {2021-01-01},
booktitle = {Machine Learning for Systems at 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021)},
abstract = {Network load balancers are central components in data centers, that distributes workloads across multiple servers and thereby contribute to offering scalable services. However, when load balancers operate in dynamic environments with limited monitoring of application server loads, they rely on heuristic algorithms that require manual configurations for fairness and performance. To alleviate that, this paper proposes a distributed asynchronous reinforcement learning mechanism to-with no active load balancer state monitoring and limited network observations-improve the fairness of the workload distribution achieved by a load balancer. The performance of proposed mechanism is evaluated and compared with stateof-the-art load balancing algorithms in a simulator, under configurations with progressively increasing complexities. Preliminary results show promise in RLbased load balancing algorithms, and identify additional challenges and future research directions, including reward function design and model scalability.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Network load balancers are central components in data centers, that distributes workloads across multiple servers and thereby contribute to offering scalable services. However, when load balancers operate in dynamic environments with limited monitoring of application server loads, they rely on heuristic algorithms that require manual configurations for fairness and performance. To alleviate that, this paper proposes a distributed asynchronous reinforcement learning mechanism to-with no active load balancer state monitoring and limited network observations-improve the fairness of the workload distribution achieved by a load balancer. The performance of proposed mechanism is evaluated and compared with stateof-the-art load balancing algorithms in a simulator, under configurations with progressively increasing complexities. Preliminary results show promise in RLbased load balancing algorithms, and identify additional challenges and future research directions, including reward function design and model scalability.
Yao, Zhiyuan; Desmouceaux, Yoann; Townsley, Mark; Clausen, Thomas Heide
Towards Intelligent Load Balancing in Data Centers Inproceedings Forthcoming
In: Machine Learning for Systems at 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021), Dec 2021, Sydney, Australia, Forthcoming.
@inproceedings{yao2021intelligent,
title = {Towards Intelligent Load Balancing in Data Centers},
author = {Zhiyuan Yao and Yoann Desmouceaux and Mark Townsley and Thomas Heide Clausen},
url = {https://www.thomasclausen.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2110.15788.pdf},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-12-01},
urldate = {2021-12-01},
booktitle = {Machine Learning for Systems at 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021), Dec 2021, Sydney, Australia},
abstract = {Network load balancers are important components in data centers to provide scalable services. Workload distribution algorithms are based on heuristics, e.g., Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP), Weighted-Cost Multi-Path (WCMP) or naive machine learning (ML) algorithms, e.g., ridge regression. Advanced ML-based approaches help achieve performance gain in different networking and system problems. However, it is challenging to apply ML algorithms on networking problems in real-life systems. It requires domain knowledge to collect features from low-latency, high-throughput, and scalable networking systems, which are dynamic and heterogenous. This paper proposes Aquarius to bridge the gap between ML and networking systems and demonstrates its usage in the context of network load balancers. This paper demonstrates its ability of conducting both offline data analysis and online model deployment in realistic systems. The results show that the ML model trained and deployed using Aquarius improves load balancing performance yet they also reveals more challenges to be resolved to apply ML for networking systems.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Network load balancers are important components in data centers to provide scalable services. Workload distribution algorithms are based on heuristics, e.g., Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP), Weighted-Cost Multi-Path (WCMP) or naive machine learning (ML) algorithms, e.g., ridge regression. Advanced ML-based approaches help achieve performance gain in different networking and system problems. However, it is challenging to apply ML algorithms on networking problems in real-life systems. It requires domain knowledge to collect features from low-latency, high-throughput, and scalable networking systems, which are dynamic and heterogenous. This paper proposes Aquarius to bridge the gap between ML and networking systems and demonstrates its usage in the context of network load balancers. This paper demonstrates its ability of conducting both offline data analysis and online model deployment in realistic systems. The results show that the ML model trained and deployed using Aquarius improves load balancing performance yet they also reveals more challenges to be resolved to apply ML for networking systems.
Rizzi, Carmine; Yao, Zhiyuan; Desmouceaux, Yoann; Townsley, Mark; Clausen, Thomas Heide
Charon: Load-Aware Load-Balancing in P4 Inproceedings
In: 1st Joint International Workshop on Network Programmability & Automation (NetPA) at 17th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2021),, 2021.
@inproceedings{rizzi2021charon,
title = {Charon: Load-Aware Load-Balancing in P4},
author = {Carmine Rizzi and Zhiyuan Yao and Yoann Desmouceaux and Mark Townsley and Thomas Heide Clausen},
url = {https://www.thomasclausen.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2110.14389.pdf},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-10-01},
urldate = {2021-01-01},
booktitle = {1st Joint International Workshop on Network Programmability & Automation (NetPA) at 17th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2021),},
abstract = {Load-Balancers play an important role in data centers as they distribute network flows across application servers and guarantee per-connection consistency. It is hard however to make fair load balancing decisions so that all resources are efficiently occupied yet not overloaded. Tracking connection states allows to infer server load states and make informed decisions, but at the cost of additional memory space consumption. This makes it hard to implement on programmable hardware, which has constrained memory but offers line-rate performance. This paper presents Charon, a stateless load-aware load balancer that has line-rate performance implemented in P4-NetFPGA. Charon passively collects load states from application servers and employs the power-of-2-choices scheme to make data-driven load balancing decisions and improve resource utilization. Perconnection consistency is preserved statelessly by encoding server ID in a covert channel. The prototype design and implementation details are described in this paper. Simulation results show performance gains in terms of load distribution fairness, quality of service, throughput and processing latency.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Load-Balancers play an important role in data centers as they distribute network flows across application servers and guarantee per-connection consistency. It is hard however to make fair load balancing decisions so that all resources are efficiently occupied yet not overloaded. Tracking connection states allows to infer server load states and make informed decisions, but at the cost of additional memory space consumption. This makes it hard to implement on programmable hardware, which has constrained memory but offers line-rate performance. This paper presents Charon, a stateless load-aware load balancer that has line-rate performance implemented in P4-NetFPGA. Charon passively collects load states from application servers and employs the power-of-2-choices scheme to make data-driven load balancing decisions and improve resource utilization. Perconnection consistency is preserved statelessly by encoding server ID in a covert channel. The prototype design and implementation details are described in this paper. Simulation results show performance gains in terms of load distribution fairness, quality of service, throughput and processing latency.