Marlow Warnicke (Weston)
Principal Cloud Engineer at SchedMD
Austin, Texas, United States
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Marlow is a Principal Cloud Engineer working on scheduling at SchedMD. She also is a chair for the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG. Marlow has expertise in resource management, the AI/ML Kubernetes cloud compute ecosystem, embedded systems, high performance compute system tools, kernel drivers, tracing libraries, and security. Marlow's interests lie in optimizing the cloud native ecosystem for both performance and sustainability.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Cracking the Data Locality Puzzle
Data transfer is slow -- so in AI and HPC, data locality matters. As workloads scale, optimizing where and how to run data-heavy workloads in Kubernetes becomes critical. Yet this area remains underexplored. The CNCF Batch Subproject shares findings from our work on data-locality-aware scheduling across clusters. Should we move compute to the data or the data to compute? What are the trade-offs in latency, cost, and efficiency?
We present methods to test potential policies: splitting jobs, exposing location-aware metadata from compute/storage, and basing scheduling on historical data and pricing. We share early discoveries from real-world tests across regions with limited bandwidth, storage, and power.
If your workloads are bottlenecked by data gravity -- or you’re chasing GPU efficiency across sites -- join us to explore emerging patterns for intelligent, cost-aware data placement in Kubernetes.
Unlocking Performance: Topology-Aware CPU Scheduling with a DRA Driver
You want optimal performance from your applications, especially in the areas of AI, Inference, Telco, and HPC. Without proper alignment for CPU, GPU, and NIC, this is not attainable. Unaligned CPUs slow down data transfers and Kubelet does not have a native way to coordinate CPU placement alongside other Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) resources, a critical bottleneck for high-performance workloads.
This session explores a CPU management solution using DRA. We'll show how a DRA driver can describe a node's CPU Topology and attributes (e.g., core types). This allows workloads to request CPUs CPUs guaranteed to align with other allocated devices. We will cover the high-level design of CPU allocation by the DRA driver and actuation by the node-level plugin.
This approach offers powerful capabilities but includes challenges like performance overhead on the scheduler and the node. We aim to foster a discussion on the trade-offs, and the future evolution of CPU management in Kubernetes.
The Spice Must Flow Green: CNCF's Environmental Sustainability TAG
The carbon must be counted.
In the Environmental Sustainability TAG, we focus on current and emerging technologies regarding carbon measurement and minimization. As our digital landscape grows, so does its impact on the environment—a factor often overlooked in the pursuit of technological advancement, such as AI.
Traditionally, companies focused primarily on financial metrics. However, with increasing awareness of climate issues, stricter regulations, and rising energy costs, environmental impact is now a crucial consideration.
We highlight the Green Reviews Working Group and our project to measure impact. We're developing a pipeline that works with current tooling, such as Kepler, to measure the power consumption of CNCF Projects. We explore how to measure energy consumption and emissions of software projects.
We also give the status of other projects, such as the sustainability landscape, initiatives such as our sustainability week, and collaborative organisations.
CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG Updates and Information
As companies feel the heat from regulations and power costs, Environmental Sustainability is an increasingly important area of focus. We will summarize some of the projects who have given demonstrations during our meetings. We will reveal the latest efforts and initiatives with the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG, including our current working groups and collaborations with other organizations. Furthermore, we will talk about how the TAG reviews successively CNCF projects to report and improve their sustainability footprint. In the end, we will highlight some of the outstanding people who make all of this work possible.
Environmental Sustainability in the Cloud Is Not a Mythical Creature
Environmental sustainability is finally taking center stage among the priorities for technology. There is growing awareness of climate change, increased emphasis on corporate responsibility, and increasing costs for not addressing these. Ultimately, the goal is Net Zero. Cloud providers and users can start tackling this with power consumption accountability, energy efficiency, GreenOps, and cost optimization techniques. Initiatives exist to monitor and address these issues, such as the Software Carbon Intensity specification, but the data is still evolving. This panel has representatives from the Green Software Foundation, CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG, and O-RAN. We will discuss areas applicable to our representative organizations, corresponding solutions, and how these complement each other. We will discuss the specifics of workloads such as Telco, HPC, AI/ML, and generic IT workloads, and the challenges around these.
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