Nima Mahmoudi received the BS degrees in Electronics and Telecommunications and the MS degree in Digital Electronics from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 2014, 2016, and 2017 respectively. He is currently working towards the PhD degree in software engineering and intelligent systems at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
He is a Research Assistant at the University of Alberta and a visiting Research Assistant in the Performant and Available Computing Systems (PACS) lab at York University, Toronto, ON, Canada. His research interests include serverless computing, cloud computing, performance modelling, applied machine learning, and distributed systems. He is a student member of the IEEE.
MSc in Digital Electronics, 2017
Amirkabir University of Technology
BSc in Telecommunications, 2016
Amirkabir University of Technology
BSc in Electronics, 2014
Amirkabir University of Technology
In our current research in Performance and Available Computing Systems (PACS) Lab at York University, we are using Queuing Theory and Semi-Markov Processes to build a performance model for serverless computing platforms, with adequate fidelity and tractability to be used for modelling large-scale deployments. You can check out our latest publications on our website.
Our paper in this research called “Performance Modeling of Serverless Computing Platforms’’ is still under review. In that paper, we were able to successfully model the performance metrics of AWS Lambda. We were also able to identify a key configuration in serverless computing platforms that can be used to optimize the overall performance of the system.
In our Serverless Computing research, our goal is to characterise and optimize the serverless computing platforms, making them adaptive and improving their performance.
In a previous study we modelled the transient aspect of the key performance metrics of modern serverless computing platforms and showed its accuracy on AWS Lambda. This work was published in the Sixth Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC'20) as part of the ACM Middleware conference. This work was an extension to our steady-state performance modelling paper which was published in IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC).
In another previous study in Dependable and Distributed Systems Lab (DDSL) at the University of Alberta, we used workload profiling and machine learning to build an adaptive function placement algorithm for serverless computing platforms. The resulting algorithm was able to achieve a better performance than the state of the art using similar hardware to perform the computing tasks.
My latest research in Computer Vision in Signal and Speech Processing Research Lab (SPRL) was on Multi-Target Object Tracking to produce high-quality object trajectories while maintaining low computational costs in order to be applicable for live implementation (e.g., autonomous vehicles). This research led to my master’s thesis and a journal paper titled “Multi-target tracking using CNN-based features: CNNMTT’’ published in Multimedia Tools and Applications. In this work we used the mid-layer output of custom-made Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) as visual queues which combined with formal tracjectory models created smooth and stable tracking results. The resulting method was one of the top 4 methods in MOT Challenge Benchmark at the time.
In a previous research we used computer vision in Control of Multi-Vehicle Systems (CMVS) Lab in the field of robotics. Some of the projects completed between 2012-2017 included using computer vision for controlling Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and Quadcopters and robust hand tracking using LBP features and Kalman Filters.
In this work, we propose an analytical performance model that captures the unique details of serverless platforms. The model can be leveraged to improve the quality of service and resource utilization and reduce the operational cost of serverless platforms. Also, the proposed performance model provides a framework that enables serverless platforms to become workload-aware.
In this work, we propose an analytical performance model that is capable of predicting several key performance metrics for serverless workloads using only their average response time for warm and cold requests. The introduced model uses realistic assumptions, which makes it suitable for online analysis of real-world platforms. We validate the proposed model through extensive experimentation on AWS Lambda.