AP NIT inks MoU with LinkedIn to facilitate cloud computing research

Tadepalligudem: National Institute of Technology (NIT) Andhra Pradesh signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with LinkedIn on 3 January 2022 to facilitate collaborative research and development between the two organizations.

The MoU was signed by Prof. C.S. P Rao, the director of NIT and Naga Krishna R. Sathvalli, the director (business systems program) of LinkedIn. Chidambaran Kollengode, the director of data and AI platforms division of LinkedIn will spearhead this research collaboration on behalf of LinkedIn.

Under this MoU, a research grant will be awarded to the principal investigator Dr. Karthick Seshadri, assistant professor of NIT Andhra Pradesh, and the co-investigator, Dr. Nagesh Bhattu Sristy, assistant professor of NIT, to solve open research problems in enabling intelligent and elastic cloud computing.

Speaking about this initiative, Prof. Rao, the director of NIT, said, "The association of the two organisations would enable joint research in the niche area of intelligent cloud computing and in fostering research to address industry-relevant problems by the academia."

The MoU is the second of its kind between the two organizations which has been made possible after the researchers at NIT Andhra Pradesh showcased significant novel research outcomes as a deliverable of the first MoU which was signed in June 2020.

Dr. Karthick Seshadri, assistant professor at NIT, said, "As an outcome of the first MoU with LinkedIn, we have set up a cloud computing test-bed using the servers sponsored through funding by LinkedIn to run the experiments at NIT Andhra Pradesh premises. To resolve the open research problems faced in orchestrating an elastic cloud, we have used workloads sampled from a real-time cloud environment to develop first-of-its-kind cloud workload characterization models and to subsequently utilize these models for capacity planning. The descriptive and predictive accuracies of the characterization models designed are better than the state-of-the-art models."

Chidambaran Kollengode, the director of LinkedIn's data and AI platforms division, said, "Scaling is a big challenge in cloud environment and truly elastic model is typically viewed as a financial optimization problem. However, we have attempted to explore the technical implications underlying this problem. To address the problem of scaling, there is a need for an efficient workload characterization model. I am happy to remark that this collaboration has been very promising and fruitful in our steps to realize a truly elastic cloud."

The researchers of NIT and Mr. Kollengode have also devised an unsupervised model for profiling the workloads arriving at the data center and a supervised ensemble model for the prediction of resource demands on cloud.

The findings of this research work were accepted for publication in 'Advances in Data Computing, Communication and Security,' a journal by Springer.