UNSW's Srikumar Venugopal

Researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) are using artificial intelligence to build a computer network they claim can regulate its own consumption of public cloud services.

A research team has built a software controller that it says could potentially be used by every virtual server instance in the cloud to monitor the performance of server applications.

The controller uses a simplified version of reinforcement learning an artificial intelligence method that is more commonly associated with robotics than IT.

Under the proposal model, if an application performance becomes critical due to a sudden increase in demand the controller will communicate with others on the network and automatically determine how and where to source extra capacity to cope with the load.

The controllers figure out which one has high load and which one has much less load and how to balance that out, said Srikumar Venugopal, a lecturer at UNSWs School of Computer Science and Engineering and leader of the research team.

Venugopal, who completed a PhD in grid computing, said most applications are not built for elasticity, a feature of cloud computing that allows administrators to add and remove resources.

This is why external scaling tools exist such as Amazons Elastic Load Balancer that enables IT staff to manually provision the right amount of resources at the right time, he said.

Administrators set rules to manage when to spin-up new virtual servers or shut them down, using historical data and their own experience to set the rules.

However, the team is hoping that its research will lead to a commercially-available product that makes these decisions automatically.

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UNSW scientists using AI to create elastic cloud