Bruno Dzikowski Successfully Defends Master’s Thesis on Performance Prediction

Yesterday, Bruno Dzikowski successfully defended his master’s thesis titled Practical Recommendations for Accurately Predicting Performance Degradation Caused by Memory Contention The thesis addresses the challenge of predicting performance in microservice-based architectures for cyber-physical systems (CPS) running on multi-core platforms, where resource contention significantly impacts accuracy. Existing methods model interference sensitivity and contentiousness but lack practical implementation guidelines.

 

Bruno’s work introduces a compositional performance prediction framework with three key contributions: 1) a validated contentiousness profiling component, 2) an analysis of how system configuration affects prediction accuracy, and 3) the design and implementation of an experimental testbed. Tested across 195 co-location scenarios, the approach achieves high accuracy (median error ≈ 1.4%), demonstrating its effectiveness for forecasting microservice performance.

We are very proud of the excellent research Bruno conducted during his internship with TNO-ESI, which resulted in an outstanding thesis that was confidently presented and defended. We thanks Bruno for the excellent collaboration and wish him all the best for his future career.

Celebrating Dr. Panos Giannakopoulos’ Dissertation Defense

Congratulations to the newly minted Dr. Panagiotis (Panos) Giannakopoulos, who has successfully defended his dissertation, Predictable Application Performance in Resource Clusters The dissertation tackles the challenge of meeting strict Round-Trip Time (RTT) deadlines for time-sensitive applications in heterogeneous, resource-constrained edge environments by developing lightweight, accurate performance predictors. These predictors leverage selected system metrics and machine learning models to anticipate execution time and variability, enabling proactive scheduling and load balancing that improve efficiency and reduce resource waste, with demonstrated success on Electron Microscopy workloads in Kubernetes-based clusters.

This research was conducted as part of the NWO ADAPTOR project, co-funded by Thermo Fisher Scientific and ASTRON. I have had the pleasure of serving on the user committee for this project over the past couple of years and was honored to be invited to join the Ph.D. committee. Over the years, Panos has presented his work at TNO-ESI several times in various settings and was also invited to share his insights at Thales. Panos will now continue his work as a postdoctoral researcher at TU/e.