Yuan Chen

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Senior Researcher
Palo Alto, CA

Biography

Yuan Chen is a Senior Researcher in Systems Research Lab at HP Labs in Palo Alto, CA. Yuan received a B.S. from University of Science and Technology of China, a M.S. from Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, all in Computer Science. Yuan's research is in the area of distributed systems and energy efficient computing with a focus on control and optimization of workload and resource management in data centers and Cloud. His work on integrated management of IT, cooling and (renewable) power resources has greatly contributed to an industry first Net-Zero Energy data center. Yuan has published over 40 technical papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences proceedings, including the Best Paper Award of International Green Computing Conference (IGCC 2011) and the Best Paper Award of IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2008). He has one patent granted and over 20 patent applications pending. Yuan has served on Technical Program Committee and been reviewers for numerous IEEE and ACM journals and conferences. He was the organizer and co-chair of the 2008 Sustainability Innovation Workshop and invited/keynote speakers for GreenMetrics 2013 and ICEP 2012.

 

Research interests

Yuan's current research interest is focused on developing energy-efficient technology to reduce power consumption and carbon footprint of data centers and Cloud. He is particularly interested in models, energy-efficient optimization algorithms and software for data center workload and resource management.  His work on integrated management of IT, cooling, and (renewable) power resources and dynamic provisioning and scheduling of IT resources with variable workload demand and renewable energy is a key component of the industry first Net-Zero Energy data center.

Yuan's past work includes enterprise systems monitoring, publish-subscribe systems, Internet storage systems, high performance computing, and data mining. 

Awards

  • "Pick of the Month" of IEEE STC on Sustainable Computing Newsletter, March 2012 
  • Best Paper Award at the IEEE Green Computing Conference (IGCC 2011), 2011
  • Best Paper Award at the IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2008), 2008
  • First Class Elite Scholarship, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1995
  • Lenovo Scholarship, University of Science and Technology of China, 1993
  • Lenovo Scholarship, University of Science and Technology of China, 1992

Publications

  • Data Center Demand Response: Avoiding the Coincident Peak via Workload Shifting and Local Generation. Zhenhua Liu, Adam Wierman, Yuan Chen, and Benjamin Razon. Proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on Computer Performance, Modeling, Measurement and Evaluation (IFIP Performance 2013), Sept. 2013.  (To appear)

  • Data Center Demand Response: Avoiding the Coincident Peak via Workload Shifting and Local Generation. Zhenhua Liu, Adam Wierman, Yuan Chen, and Benjamin Razon. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Measurements and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS 2013), June 2013. (Poster)

  • Maximizing Server Utilization while Meeting Critical SLAs through Weight-Based Collocation Management. Sergey Blagodurov, Daniel Gmach, Martin Arlitt, Yuan Chen, Chris Hyser, and Alexandra Fedorova, Proceedings of the13th IFIP/IEEE Symposium on Integrated Network and Service Management (IM 2013), May 2013.

  • Visual Analytics for Cyber Physical Data Streams Using Spatio-Temporal Radial Pixel Visualization. Ming Hao, Manish Marwah, Sebastian Mittelstadt, Halldor Janetzko, Daniel Keim, Umeshwar Dayal, Cullen Bash, Carlos Felix, Chandrakant Patel, Meichun Hsu, and Yuan Chen. Proceedings of IS&T/SPIE Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis (VDA 2013), Feb. 2013.  

  • Energy-Efficient Virtual Machine Scheduling in Performance-Asymmetric Multi-Core Architectures. Yefu Wang, Xiaorui Wang, Yuan Chen. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2012), Oct, 2012.

  • Renewable and Cooling Aware Workload Management for Sustainable Data Centers. Zhenhua Liu, Yuan Chen, Cullen Bash, Adam Wierman, Daniel Gmach, Zhikui Wang, Manish Marwah, and Chris Hyser. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Measurements and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS 2012), June 2012. 

  • Hybrid Resource Provisioning for Minimizing Data Center SLA Violations and Power Consumption. Anshul Gandhi, Yuan Chen, Daniel Gmach, Martin Arlitt, and Manish Marwah. Journal of Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems (SUSCOM), 2012.

  • Sources of Variability in Data Center Lifecycle Assessment. Amip Shah, Yuan Chen, and Cullen Bash. Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology (ISSST 2012), May 2012.

  • Towards The Design And Operation Of Net-Zero Energy Data Centers. Martin Arlitt, Cullen Bash, Sergey Blagodurov, Yuan Chen, Tom Christian, Daniel Gmach, Chris Hyser, Niru Kumari, Zhenhua Liu, Manish Marwah, Alan McReynolds, Chandrakant Patel, Amip Shah, Zhikui Wang, and Rongliang Zhou. Proceedings of the 13th Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems (ITherm 2012), May 2012.

  • Optimizing Data Center Energy Efficiency via Ambient-Aware IT Workload Scheduling. N. Kumari, A. Shah, C. Bash, Y. Chen, Z. Liu, Z. Wang, T. Cader, M. Slaby, D. Cepulis, C. Felix, A. Aviles, and M. Figueroa.  Proceedings of the 13th Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems (ITherm 2012), May 2012.

  • Minimizing Data Center SLA Violations and Power Consumption via Hybrid Resource Provisioning. Anshul Gandhi, Yuan Chen, Daniel Gmach, Martin Arlitt, and Manish Marwah. Proceedings of the Second International Green Computing Conference (IGCC 2011), July 2011. Best Paper Award

  • Cloud Sustainability Dashboard -- Dynamically Assessing Sustainability of Data Centers and Clouds. Cullen Bash, Yuan Chen, Daniel Gmach, Richard Kaufman, Dejan Milojicic, Vishwanath RN, Amip Shah, Puneet Sharma, and Tahir Cader. In 2011 Open Cirrus Summit, June 2011.  

  • Improving Server Power Management in Research and Development Data Centers. Chris Hyser, Daniel Gmach, Umesh ML, Yuan Chen, and Vijay Suryanarayana. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual ACM Bangalore Conference (Compute'11), March 2011.

  • Capacity Planning and Power Management to Exploit Sustainable Energy. Daniel Gmach, Jerry Rolia, Cullen Bash, Yuan Chen, Tom Christian, and Amip Shah. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Network and Services Management (CNSM 2010), October 2010.

  • Thermal Management Considerations for Geographically Distributed Computing Infrastructures. Amip Shah, Cullen Bash, Martin Arlitt, Yuan Chen,Daniel Gmach, Ratnesh Sharma, and Chandrakant Patel. Proceedings of the 14th International Heat Transfer Conference (IHTC-14), August 2010.

  • Probabilistic Performance Modeling of Virtualized Resource Allocation. Brian J. Watson, Manish Marwah, Daniel Gmach, Yuan Chen, Martin Arlitt, and Zhikui Wang.  Proceedings of the 7th Int. Conf. on Autonomic Computing and Communications (ICAC 2010), June 2010.

  • Profiling Sustainability of Data Centers. Daniel Gmach, Yuan Chen, Amip Shah, Jerry Rolia, Cullen Bash, Tom Christian, and Ratnesh Sharma. Proceedings of the 2010 International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology (ISSST 2010), May 2010.

  • Integrated Management of Application Performance, Power and Cooling in Data Centers. Yuan Chen, Daniel Gmach, Chris Hyser, Zhikui Wang, Cullen Bash, Christopher Hoover, and Sharad Singhal. Proceedings of the 12th IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2010), April 2010.

  • AppRAISE: Application-level Performance Management in Virtualized Server Environment. Zhikui Wang, Yuan Chen, Daniel Gmach, Sharad Singhal, Brian Watson, Wilson Rivera, Xiaoyuan Zhu, and Chris Hyser. IEEE Transaction on Network and Service Management, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 240-254, December 2009.

  • Automated Synthesis of Sustainable Data Centers. Tom Christian, Yuan Chen, Rocky Shih, Ratnesh Sharma,Christopher Hoover, Manish Marwah, AmipShah, and Daniel Gmach. Proceedings of the 2009 ISSST International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology (ISSST 2009), May 2009.

  • A Systematic and Practical Approach to Generating Policies from Service Level Objectives. Yuan Chen, Subu Iyer, Akhil Sahai and Dejan Milojicic. Proceedings of the 11th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2009), June 2009.

  • Translating Service Level Objectives to Lower Level Policies for Multi-tier Services. Yuan Chen, Subu Iyer, Xue Liu, Dejan Milojicic, and Akhil Sahai. Journal of Cluster Computing (CC), Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 299-311, September 2008.

  • A State Space Approach to SLA based Management. Vibhore Kumar, Subu Iyer, Yuan Chen, Akhil Sahai, and Karsten Schwan. Proceedings of the IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2008). Best Paper Award

  • Improving Distributed Service Management Using Service Modeling Language (SML). Robert Adams, Ricardo Rivaldo, Guilherme Germoglio, Flávio Santos, Yuan Chen, and Dejan Milojicic.Proceedings of the IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2008). (short paper)

  • A Game Theoretic Framework for SLA Negotiation. Cristian Figueroa, Nicolas Figueroa, Alejandro Jofre, Akhil Sahai, Yuan Chen, and Subu Iyer. HP Labs Technical Report, HPL-2008-5, 2008.
    paper)

  • SLA Decomposition: Translating Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to Low-level System Thresholds. Yuan Chen, Subu Iyer, Xue Liu, Dejan Milojicic, and Akhil Sahai. Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2007), June 2007.

  • Automated Availability Management Driven by Business Policie/a>. Zhongtang Cai, Yuan Chen, Vibhore Kumar, Dejan Milojicic, and Karsten Schwan. Proceedings of the 10th IFIP/IEEE Symposium on Integrated Management (IM 2007), pages 264-273,May 2007.

  • SML Model-based Management. Ricardo Rivaldo, Yuan Chen, Dejan Milojicic, and Robert Adams. Proceedings of 10th IFIP/IEEE Symposium on Integrated Management (IM 2007), pages 761-764, May 2007. (short paper)

  • Specification-Enhanced Policies for Automated Management of Changes in IT Systems. Chetan Shankar, Vanish Talwar, Subu Iyer, Yuan Chen, and Dejan Milojicic. Proceedings of the 20th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA 2006),pages 103-118, December 2006.

  • QMON: QoS- and Utility-Aware Monitoring in Enterprise Systems.Sandip Agarwala, Yuan Chen, Dejan Milojicic, and Karsten Schwan. Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2006), pages 124-133, June 2006.

  • Opportunistic Overlays: Efficient Content Delivery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Yuan Chen, and Karsten Schwan. Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2005), pages 354-374, November 2005.

  • Opportunistic Channels: Mobility-aware Event Delivery. Yuan Chen, Karsten Schwan, and Dong Zhou. Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2003), pages 182-201, June 2003.

  • Java Mirrors: Building Blocks for Remote Interaction. Yuan Chen, Karsten Schwan, and David Rosen. Proceedings of the 16th International Parallel Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2002), pages 36-41, April 2002.

  • Active Brokers and Their Runtime Deployment in the Echo/JECho Distributed Event Systems. Dong Zhou, Yuan Chen, Greg Eisenhauer, and Karsten Schwan. Proceedings of the 3rd Annual International Workshop on Active Middleware Services (AMS 2001), pages 67-72, August 2001.

  • JECho -- Interactive High Performance Computing with Java Event Channels Dong Zhou, Karsten Schwan, Greg Eisenhauer, and Yuan Chen. Proceedings of the 15th International Parallel Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2001), pages 50-57, April 2001.

  • A Prototype Implementation of Archival Intermemory. Yuan Chen, Jan Edler, Andrew V. Goldberg, Allan Gottlieb, Sumeet Sobti, and Peter N. Yianilos. Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Digital Libraries (DL 1999, now JCDL), pages 28-37, August 1999. One of most cited articles in Computer Science published in 1999 according to CiteSeer

  • A Comparison and Analysis of Different Approaches for Solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems. Yuan Chen, and Zhongzhi Shi. Journal of Computer Science, Vol. 25, No.1,pages 8-12, 1998. (in Chinese)

  • GQSS: A QSIM-based General Qualitative Simulation System. Fangzhou Bai, Yuan Chen, and Zhonggui Bao. Journal of Information and Control, Vol. 25, No.1, pages .49-57, 1996. (in Chinese)

Patents

1

Professional activities

  • Keynote speaker for GreenMetrics 2013, June 2013
  • Invited speaker for Imperial College Energy and Performance Colloquium (ICEP 2012), June 2012
  • Organizer and Co-chair of the 2008 Sustainability Innovation Workshop
  • TPC Member: ICAC 2013, MASCOTS 2013, Greenmetrics 2013, ICAC 2012, HotPower 2012, GreenMetrics 2012, SmartGreens 2012, HPPAC 2012, GreenCloud 2012, HPPAC 2011, HPPAC 2010
  • Reviewer for numerous IEEE and ACM professional journals and conferences 
  • Editor of IEEE Distributed Systems Online (Operating Systems)
  • Member of ACM, IEEE Computer Society and USENIX