June 05, 2019

Castro Announces $243K NSF Grant to UTSA for Development of Cloud Platform Microservices

SAN ANTONIO—Congressman Joaquin Castro (TX-20), Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Vice Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and a member of the House Intelligence and Education and Labor Committees, today announced that the National Science Foundation (NSF) intends to award $243,940.00 to the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) for a project that will develop novel performance models and resource management solutions to enable cloud platforms to increase its performance in large-scale web services.

“Cloud-based platforms represent one of the fastest growing web services used by Americans. As we move to incorporate these services into our daily lives, we must also consider how they are being provided.” said Congressman Castro. “It is important that we continue to improve our technologies while addressing operational concerns when they arise. I am glad to see the University of Texas at San Antonio take steps to improve operations surrounding cloud-based services and I look forward to the results of their work.”

Background: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced its intent to award $243,940.00 to the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) for a project entitled "CNS Core: Small: Robust Performance Guarantee of Containerized Microservices in the Cloud." Web services are increasingly built with small modular components (microservices) that can be deployed effortlessly. However, complex interactions and criticism of shared resources in datacenters have created challenges in managing cloud performance. Under the direction of UTSA’s Palden Lama, the project’s goal will seek to improve the performance, cost-efficiency, and scalability of a broad range of cloud applications. The project will comprise of two central components: Developing performance models to quickly predict and adapt to changing systems; and incorporating predictive uncertainty through proposed resource scaling systems to better manage workflow latency of microservices. The award is projected to begin October 01, 2019 and last until September 30, 2022.

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