Feedback Control of Computing Systems
Faisal Obaid, Salman Ahmed · 2019 IEEE 6th International Conference on Engineering Technologies and Applied Sciences (ICETAS) · 2019
Computing systems are dynamic systems and they are important in ensuring the safety, profit and availability of many physical and business systems. Examples of computing systems can be found in almost every area of life and sciences such as e-commerce, financial (banking) webservers, stock markets, educational webservers and nuclear systems. Traditionally, the design of computing systems relied heavily on using tools from queuing theory to design scheduling algorithms, and very few computing scientists having familiarity with control theory. In this paper, we apply concepts from control theory to the design of computing systems. An interesting problem in computing systems in the clock synchronization problem. In terms of control system theory, a clock is an unstable system and synchronizing a clock can be classified as a feedback controller design problem. However, unlike traditional control systems, designing such a feedback controller is more challenging due to the fact that the system (or plant) itself is unstable and the job of the controller is only to synchronize it (and not stabilize it). This problem becomes more interesting when we considered networked computing systems and introduce time delays in such systems.