Danilo Ardagna

This section of the Web site provides theses and projects proposals for students. The main topics are Service center energy management, virtualized systems performance evaluation, and Cloud computing.

If you are interested in one of the proposal, contact me by e-mail.

Active Energy Management of Service Centers Infrastructures

Energy management is rapidly becoming a priority in the design and operation of complex service-based information systems, as the impact of energy consumption associated with IT infrastructures increases. The thesis aims at introducing a novel interdisciplinary approach for the development of advanced active energy-aware policies for the management of modern IT infrastructures based on expertise from several research areas: Web service technologies, optimization, performance evaluation, model identification, robust, and predictive control..

Pre-requisites: Optimization, Performance evaluation, Control Theory, Java programming.

Dynamic management of virtualized systems

In order to reduce the operating costs of IT systems, nowadays service applications are executed in virtualized infrastructures and a time varying fraction of the physical servers' capacity is shared among running applications. The performance modelling of a virtualized server is very challenging as the impact of the choice of the Virtual Machine Monitor scheduler, its parameters and I/O management overhead is still only partially understood. The thesis aims at developing a framework for the performance estimation and dynamic management of virtualized systems.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm which allows the on-demand delivering of software, hardware, and data as services, providing end-users with flexible and scalable systems accessible through the Internet. Large data centers provide the infrastructure behind the Cloud and virtualization technology makes Cloud computing resources more efficient and cost-effective both for providers and customers. Indeed, end-users obtain the benefits of the infrastructure without the need to implement and administer it directly adding or removing capacity almost instantaneously on a pay-per-use basis. Cloud providers can, on the other hand, maximize the utilization of their physical resources also obtaining economies of scale. The thesis goal is the development of efficient service provisioning policies for Cloud systems.

Pre-requisites: Optimization, Game Theory, Performance evaluation, Java programming.