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Learn about Quicksand, a novel framework and runtime system designed to address datacenter resource waste through granular computing in this 17-minute conference presentation from NSDI '25. Discover how modern datacenters waste significant CPU and memory resources due to mismatches between application demands and available machine resources, leading to "stranded resources" that reduce server utilization and increase costs. Explore Quicksand's innovative approach to unstrand these resources by providing developers with familiar high-level abstractions like data structures and batch computing while internally decomposing them into "resource proclets" - granular units that primarily consume one type of resource. Understand how this system, inspired by recent granular programming models, decouples resource consumption and enables rapid splitting, merging, and migration of resource proclets within milliseconds to utilize resources across any machine, even when available only briefly. Examine evaluation results from four applications demonstrating Quicksand's effectiveness in using stranded resources, its millisecond-level reaction time to changing resource availability and demand, and the moderate effort required to port existing applications to the framework.
