Minxian Xu

Wanyi Zheng, Minxian Xu, Shengye Song et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular in various areas, traditional business gradually shifting from rule-based systems to LLM-based solutions. However, the inference of LLMs is resource-intensive or latency-sensitive, posing significant challenges for serving systems. Existing LLM serving systems often use static or continuous batching strategies, which can lead to inefficient GPU memory utilization and increased latency, especially under heterogeneous workloads. These methods may also struggle to adapt to dynamic workload fluctuations, resulting in suboptimal throughput and potential service level objective (SLO) violations. In this paper, we introduce BucketServe, a bucket-based dynamic batching framework designed to optimize LLM inference performance. By grouping requests into size-homogeneous buckets based on sequence length, BucketServe minimizes padding overhead and optimizes GPU memory usage through real-time batch size adjustments preventing out-of-memory (OOM) errors. It introduces adaptive bucket splitting/merging and priority-aware scheduling to mitigate resource fragmentation and ensure SLO compliance. Experiment shows that BucketServe significantly outperforms UELLM in throughput, achieving up to 3.58x improvement. It can also handle 1.93x more request load under the SLO attainment of 80% compared with DistServe and demonstrates 1.975x higher system load capacity compared to the UELLM.

Sukhpal Singh Gill, Minxian Xu, Panos Patros et al.

ChatGPT, an AI-based chatbot, was released to provide coherent and useful replies based on analysis of large volumes of data. In this article, leading scientists, researchers and engineers discuss the transformative effects of ChatGPT on modern education. This research seeks to improve our knowledge of ChatGPT capabilities and its use in the education sector, identifying potential concerns and challenges. Our preliminary evaluation concludes that ChatGPT performed differently in each subject area including finance, coding and maths. While ChatGPT has the ability to help educators by creating instructional content, offering suggestions and acting as an online educator to learners by answering questions and promoting group work, there are clear drawbacks in its use, such as the possibility of producing inaccurate or false data and circumventing duplicate content (plagiarism) detectors where originality is essential. The often reported hallucinations within Generative AI in general, and also relevant for ChatGPT, can render its use of limited benefit where accuracy is essential. What ChatGPT lacks is a stochastic measure to help provide sincere and sensitive communication with its users. Academic regulations and evaluation practices used in educational institutions need to be updated, should ChatGPT be used as a tool in education. To address the transformative effects of ChatGPT on the learning environment, educating teachers and students alike about its capabilities and limitations will be crucial.

Zhiheng Zhong, Minxian Xu, Maria Alejandra Rodriguez et al.

Containerization is a lightweight application virtualization technology, providing high environmental consistency, operating system distribution portability, and resource isolation. Existing mainstream cloud service providers have prevalently adopted container technologies in their distributed system infrastructures for automated application management. To handle the automation of deployment, maintenance, autoscaling, and networking of containerized applications, container orchestration is proposed as an essential research problem. However, the highly dynamic and diverse feature of cloud workloads and environments considerably raises the complexity of orchestration mechanisms. Machine learning algorithms are accordingly employed by container orchestration systems for behavior modelling and prediction of multi-dimensional performance metrics. Such insights could further improve the quality of resource provisioning decisions in response to the changing workloads under complex environments. In this paper, we present a comprehensive literature review of existing machine learning-based container orchestration approaches. Detailed taxonomies are proposed to classify the current researches by their common features. Moreover, the evolution of machine learning-based container orchestration technologies from the year 2016 to 2021 has been designed based on objectives and metrics. A comparative analysis of the reviewed techniques is conducted according to the proposed taxonomies, with emphasis on their key characteristics. Finally, various open research challenges and potential future directions are highlighted.