Multiobjective virtual machine placement mechanisms using nature‐inspired metaheuristic algorithms in cloud environments: A comprehensive review

Cloud computing introduced a new paradigm in IT industry by providing on‐demand, elastic, ubiquitous computing resources for users. In a virtualized cloud data center, there are a large number of physical machines (PMs) hosting different types of virtual machines (VMs). Unfortunately, the cloud data centers do not fully utilize their computing resources and cause a considerable amount of energy waste that has a great operational cost and dramatic impact on the environment. Server consolidation is one of the techniques that provide efficient use of physical resources by reducing the number of active servers. Since VM placement plays an important role in server consolidation, one of the main challenges in cloud data centers is an efficient mapping of VMs to PMs. Multiobjective VM placement is generating considerable interest among researchers and academia. This paper aims to represent a detailed review of the recent state‐of‐the‐art multiobjective VM placement mechanisms using nature‐inspired metaheuristic algorithms in cloud environments. Also, it gives special attention to the parameters and approaches used for placing VMs into PMs. In the end, we will discuss and explore further works that can be done in this area of research.     

Design of energy‐efficient cloud systems via network and resource virtualization

Data centers play a crucial role in the delivery of cloud services by enabling on‐demand access to the shared resources such as software, platform and infrastructure. Virtual machine (VM) allocation is one of the challenging tasks in data center management since user requirements, typically expressed as service‐level agreements, have to be met with the minimum operational expenditure. Despite their huge processing and storage facilities, data centers are among the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions of IT services. In this paper, we propose a holistic approach for a large‐scale cloud system where the cloud services are provisioned by several data centers interconnected over the backbone network. Leveraging the possibility to virtualize the backbone topology in order to bypass IP routers, which are major power consumers in the core network, we propose a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for VM placement that aims at minimizing both power consumption at the virtualized backbone network and resource usage inside data centers. Since the general holistic MILP formulation requires heavy and long‐running computations, we partition the problem into two sub‐problems, namely, intra and inter‐data center VM placement. In addition, for the inter‐data center VM placement, we also propose a heuristic to solve the virtualized backbone topology reconfiguration computation in reasonable time. We thoroughly assessed the performance of our proposed solution, comparing it with another notable MILP proposal in the literature; collected experimental results show the benefit of the proposed management scheme in terms of power consumption, resource utilization and fairness for medium size data centers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Modified Packing Algorithm for Dynamic Energy-Saving in Cloud Computing Servers

Since the raising of the cloud computing, the applications of web service have been extended rapidly. However, the data centers of cloud computing also cause the problem of power consumption and the resources usually have not been used effectively. Decreasing the power consumption and enhancing resource utilization become main issues in cloud computing environment. In this paper, we propose a method, called MBFDP (modified best fit decreasing packing), to decrease power consumption and enhance resource utilization of cloud computing servers. From the results of experiments, the proposed solution can reduce power consumption effectively and enhance the utilization of resources of servers.     

QMLFD Based RSA Cryptosystem for Enhancing Data Security in Public Cloud Storage System

Nowadays sharing secure data turns out to be a challenging task for the data owner due to its privacy and confidentiality. Several IT companies stores their important information in the cloud since computing has developed immense power in sharing the data. On the other hand, privacy is considered a serious issue in cloud computing as there are numerous privacy concerns namely integrity, authentication as well as confidentiality. Among all those concerns, this paper focuses on enhancing the data integrity in the public cloud environment using Qusai modified levy flight distribution for the RSA cryptosystem (QMLFD-RSA). An effective approach named QMLFD for the RSA cryptosystem is proposed for resolving the problem based on data integrity in public cloud environment. A secured key generation and data encryption are done by employing the RSA cryptosystem thus the data is secured from unauthorized users. The key selection is done by using quasi based modified Levy flight distribution algorithm. Thus the proposed approach provides an effective model to enhance the integrity of data in cloud computing thus checking the data integrity uploaded in the public cloud storage system. In addition to this, ten optimization benchmark functions are calculated to determine the performances and the functioning of the newly developed QMLFD algorithm. The simulation results and comparative performances are carried out and the analysis reveals that the proposed QMLFD for the RSA cryptosystem provides better results when compared with other approaches.

     

A Lion‐Whale optimization‐based migration of virtual machines for data centers in cloud computing

The scalability, reliability, and flexibility in the cloud computing services are the obligations in the growing demand of computation power. To sustain the scalability, a proper virtual machine migration (VMM) approach is needed with apt balance on quality of service and service‐level agreement violation. In this paper, a novel VMM algorithm based on Lion‐Whale optimization is developed by integrating the Lion optimization algorithm and the Whale optimization algorithm. The optimal virtual machine (VM) migration is performed by the Lion‐Whale VMM based on a new fitness function in the regulation of the resource use, migration cost, and energy consumption of VM placement. The experimentation of the proposed VM migration strategy is performed over 4 cloud setups with a different configuration which are simulated using CloudSim toolkit. The performance of the proposed method is validated over existing optimization‐based VMM algorithms, such as particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithm, using the performance measures, such as energy consumption, migration cost, and resource use. Simulation results reveal the fact that the proposed Lion‐Whale VMM effectively outperforms other existing approaches in optimal VM placement for cloud computing environment with reduced migration cost of 0.01, maximal resource use of 0.36, and minimal energy consumption of 0.09.     

云计算数据中心节能关键技术分析

随着经济的快速发展,各行各业对于信息化的运用越来越普遍,云计算作为信息化技术发展中的一部分,对云计算数据中心节能进行定量指标方面的分析和研究,并且针对云计算数据中心节能的一些关键性技术,即机房选址、IT设备选型、电源系统优化、制冷系统设计和应用场景的选择等进行详细的分析和研究.     

基于改进遗传算法的云教学平台研究

云计算技术迅猛发展,云计算辅助教学平台应运而生,具有网络化的海量教学数据资源存储与计算功能和瘦客户端等显著优点,云辅助教学平台数据量和用户量巨大的特点决定了其作业类型的多样性和数据密集性,云辅助教学平台的设计重点在高效率的资源管理和调度。文中设计云计算辅助教学平台的体系结构,并对云平台作业调度的原有自适应遗传算法做出改进,以传统遗传算法做基础,综合数据公平和本地性选择遗传基因,相比较传统算法,在响应用户需求上更高效。仿真实验结果显示改进后算法更能体现公平性、并提高了效率,更适于云计算机环境。     

Identifying critical challenges in the adoption of cloud‐based services

Cloud computing provides a way to integrate and share information on a real‐time basis across an organization. The current organizations are adopting the cloud services to gain competitive advantage in real‐time data sharing. To meet the current demand in semiconductor industries, they must develop better techniques to produce electronic products at low cost and in a large scale. Adoption of cloud‐based services may resolve the fastest growing demand of technical advancement of semiconductor industries. The research presented in this paper is based on an analysis of the data obtained from the semiconductor sector. This study identifies the critical challenges associated with the cloud service adoption in semiconductor industries. Twelve critical challenges have been identified that need to be overcome for adopting the cloud services for any semiconductor industry. These are network/Internet availability, data security, integration of various services, monitoring of data and services, maintenance of computing performance, liability, power outage, service interruption, organizational change, business complexity, legal issues, and lack of awareness.     

Phased Scheduling for Resource-Constrained Mobile Devices in Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing combines wireless access service and cloud computing to improve the performance of mobile applications. Mobile cloud computing can balance the application distribution between the mobile device and the cloud, in order to achieve faster interactions, battery savings and better resource utilization. To support mobile cloud computing, the paper proposes a phased scheduling model of mobile cloud such that mobile device’s users experience lower interaction times and extended battery life. The phased scheduling optimization is solved by two subproblems: mobile device’s batch application optimization and mobile device’s job level optimization. At the first stage, the mobile cloud global scheduling optimization implements the allocation of the cloud resources to the mobile device’s batch applications. At the second stage, mobile device’s job level optimization adjusts the cloud resource usages to optimize the utility of single mobile device’s application. In the simulations, compared with other algorithm, our proposed mobile cloud phased scheduling algorithms achieve the better performance with acceptable overhead.     

An efficient algorithm for dynamic task offloading using cloudlets in mobile cloud computing

It is a visible fact that the growth of mobile devices is enormous. More computations are required to be carried out for various applications in these mobile devices. But the drawback of the mobile devices is less computation power and low available energy. The mobile cloud computing helps in resolving these issues by integrating the mobile devices with cloud technology. Again, the issue is increased in the latency as the task and data to be offloaded to the cloud environment uses WAN. Hence, to decrease the latency, this paper proposes cloudlet‐based dynamic task offloading (CDTO) algorithm where the task can be executed in device environment, cloudlet environment, cloud server environment, and integrated environment. The proposed algorithm, CDTO, is tested in terms of energy consumption and completion time.     

An autonomic risk‐ and penalty‐aware resource allocation with probabilistic resource scaling mechanism for multilayer cloud resource provisioning

Cloud computing environment allows presenting different services on the Internet in exchange for cost payment. Cloud providers can minimize their operational costs by auto‐scaling of the computational resources based on demand received from users. However, the time and cost required to increase and decrease the number of active computational resources are among the biggest limitations of scalability. Thus, auto‐scaling is considered as one of the most important challenges in the field of cloud computing. The present study aimed to present a new solution to automatic scalability of resources for multilayered cloud applications under the Monitor‐Analysis‐Plan‐Execute‐Knowledge loop. In addition, the Google penalty payment model was used to model the penalty costs in the problem and to accurately evaluate the earned profit. A hybrid resource load prediction algorithm was proposed to evaluate the future of resources in each cloud layer. Further, we used statistical solution to determine the statuses of VMs in addition to presenting a risk‐aware algorithm to allocate the user requests to active resources. The experimental results by Cloudsim indicated the improvement of the proposed approach in terms of operational costs, the number of used resources, and the amount of profit.     

Resource-efficient load-balancing framework for cloud data center networks

Cloud computing has drastically reduced the price of computing resources through the use of virtualized resources that are shared among users. However, the established large cloud data centers have a large carbon footprint owing to their excessive power consumption. Inefficiency in resource utilization and power consumption results in the low fiscal gain of service providers. Therefore, data centers should adopt an effective resource-management approach. In this paper, we present a novel load-balancing framework with the objective of minimizing the operational cost of data centers through improved resource utilization. The framework utilizes a modified genetic algorithm for realizing the optimal allocation of virtual machines (VMs) over physical machines. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves the resource utilization by up to 45.21%, 84.49%, 119.93%, and 113.96% over a recent and three other standard heuristics-based VM placement approaches.     

A fault‐tolerant workflow management system with Quality‐of‐Service‐aware scheduling for scientific workflows in cloud computing

Cloud computing provides solutions to many scientific and business applications. Large‐scale scientific applications, which are structured as scientific workflows, are evaluated through cloud computing. In this paper, we proposed a Quality‐of‐Service‐aware fault‐tolerant workflow management system (QFWMS) for scientific workflows in cloud computing. We have considered two real‐time scientific workflows, i.e., Montage and CyberShake, for an evaluation of the proposed QFWMS. The results of the proposed QFWMS scheduling were evaluated through simulation environment WorkflowSim and compared with three well‐known heuristic scheduling policies: (a) minimum completion time (MCT), (b) Maximum‐minimum (Max‐min), and (c) Minimum‐minimum (Min‐min). By considering Montage scientific workflow, the proposed QFWMS reduces the make‐span 8.86%, 8.94%, and 5.53% compared with existing three heuristic policies. Similarly, the proposed QFWMS reduces the cost 6.19%, 3.52%, and 3.60% compared with existing three heuristic policies. Likewise, by considering CyberShake scientific workflow, the proposed QFWMS reduces the make‐span 19.54%, 21.41%, and 25.71% compared with existing three heuristic policies. Similarly, the proposed QFWMS reduces the cost 8.78%, 8.40%, and 8.61% compared with existing three heuristic policies. More so, for QFWMS, SLA is neither violated for time constraints nor for cost constraints. While for MCT, Max‐min and Min‐min scheduling policies, SLA is violated 32, 37, and 23 times, respectively. Conclusively, the proposed QFWMS scheduling and management system is one of the significant workflow management systems for execution and management of scientific workflows in cloud computing.     

云计算环境下基于属性的可净化签名方案

基于属性的签名近年来由于云计算的大规模应用而备受关注。为了有效保护云计算环境下数据中的敏感信息,该文将可净化的思想引入基于属性的签名中,提出云计算环境下基于属性的可净化签名的方案。该方案中的签名者可以指定净化者对已经签名的文件进行改动,使之隐私部分不再呈现,可以有效解决云端数据中敏感信息隐藏与签名者隐私性的问题。方案在标准模型下证明基于属性的可净化签名方案是不可伪造的。分析表明,所提方案可以解决云计算环境下数据的敏感信息隐藏问题。     

云计算环境下任务调度算法的研究

在云计算环境中存在庞大的任务数,为了能更加高效地完成任务请求,如何进行有效地任务调度是云计算环境下实现按需分配资源的关键。针对调度问题提出了一种基于蚁群优化的任务调度算法,该算法能适应云计算环境下的动态特性,且集成了蚁群算法在处理NP-Hard问题时的优点。该算法旨在减少任务调度完成时间。通过在CloudSim平台进行仿真实验,实验结果表明,改进后的算法能减少任务平均完成时间、并能在云计算环境下有效提高调度效率。     

浅谈云技术对石油行业的影响

当前,全球IT产业正在经历着一场声势浩大的“云计算”浪潮。云计算整合了IT资源并以统一的方式提供给用户使用,对IT资源的利用具有较大的规模效应,能够为用户节约大量的成本,有着巨大的应用潜力。云技术不仅仅对IT行业起到了不可估量的作用,也对其他行业产生了影响。将云技术运用到石油行业,对石油行业的数据存储服务;绿色环保,低碳理念;海量数据的分析处理;提供在线软件服务等均产生了一系列重大的影响。随着计算机的普及和网络的发展,云技术将给信息时代带来更多的改变。     

PAVM: a framework for policy‐aware virtual machine management

The problem of efficient placement of virtual machines (VMs) in cloud computing infrastructure is well studied in the literature. VM placement decision involves selecting a physical machine in the data center to host a specific VM. This decision could play a pivotal role in yielding high efficiency for both the cloud and its users. Also, reallocation of VMs could be performed through migrations to achieve goals like higher server consolidation or power saving. VM placement and reallocation decisions may consider affinities such as memory sharing, CPU processing, disk sharing, and network bandwidth requirements between VMs defined in multiple dimensions. Considering the NP‐hard complexity associated with computing an optimal solution for this VM placement decision problem, existing research employs heuristic‐based techniques to compute an efficient solution. However, most of these approaches are restricted to only a single attribute at a time. That is, a given technique of using heuristics to compute VM placement considers only a single attribute, while completely ignoring the impact of other dimensions of placing VMs. While this approach may improve the efficiency with respect to the affinity attribute in consideration, it may yield degraded performance with respect to other affinities. In addition, the criteria for determining VM‐placement efficiency may vary for different applications. Hence, the overall goal of achieving VM placement efficiency becomes difficult and challenging. We are motivated by this challenging problem of efficient VM placement and propose policy‐aware virtual machine management (PAVM), a generic framework that can be used for efficient VM management in a cloud computing platform based on the service provider‐defined policies to achieve the desired system‐wide goals. This involves efficient means to profile different VM affinities and to use profiled information effectively by intelligent and efficient VM migrations at run time considering multiple attributes at a time. By conducting extensive evaluation through simulation and real experiments that involve VM affinities on the basis of network and memory, we confirmed that the PAVM architecture is capable of improving the efficiency of a cloud system. We elaborate the architecture of a PAVM system, describe its implementation, and present details of our experiments. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A prediction‐based and power‐aware virtual machine allocation algorithm in three‐tier cloud data centers

With the increasing popularity of cloud computing services, the more number of cloud data centers are constructed over the globe. This makes the power consumption of cloud data center elements as a big challenge. Hereby, several software and hardware approaches have been proposed to handle this issue. However, this problem has not been optimally solved yet. In this paper, we propose an online cloud resource management with live migration of virtual machines (VMs) to reduce power consumption. To do so, a prediction‐based and power‐aware virtual machine allocation algorithm is proposed. Also, we present a three‐tier framework for energy‐efficient resource management in cloud data centers. Experimental results indicate that the proposed solution reduces the power consumption; at the same time, service‐level agreement violation (SLAV) is also improved.     

An agent‐based workflow scheduling mechanism with deadline constraint on hybrid cloud environment

Summary

With the advances of cloud computing, business and scientific‐oriented jobs with certain workflows are increasingly migrated to and run on a variety of cloud environments. These jobs are often with the property of deadline constraint and have to be completed within limited time. Therefore, to schedule a job with workflow (short for workflow) with deadline constraint is increasingly becoming a crucial research issue. In this paper, we, based on previous work, propose an agent‐based workflow scheduling mechanism to schedule workflows that are with deadline constraint into federated cloud environment.

Design and Methods

We add a workflow agent into the original framework to schedule the deadline‐constraint workflow. The workflow agent can smoothly schedule workflows to the cloud system according to their required resource and automatically monitor their execution. In order to accurately predict the execution time of each task to meet deadline constraint on certain VM with given resource, we inherit the use of rough set theory to estimate execution time of task in our previous work.

Result and Discussion

A heuristic algorithm that is embedded into the workflow agent is also proposed because the problem had been shown to be NP‐complete. The mechanism also adopts dynamic job dispatching method to reduce the usage of VM and to improve the resource utilization. We also conducted experiments to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness.

Conclusion

The experimental results show that the prediction time is very close to the real execution time and can efficiently schedule multiple scientific workflows to meet the deadline constraints simultaneously.     

A genetic algorithm‐based task scheduling for cloud resource crowd‐funding model

With the rapid development of cloud computing, the number of cloud users is growing exponentially. Data centers have come under great pressure, and the problem of power consumption has become increasingly prominent. However, many idle resources that are geographically distributed in the network can be used as resource providers for cloud tasks. These distributed resources may not be able to support the resource‐intensive applications alone because of their limited capacity; however, the capacity will be considerably increased if they can cooperate with each other and share resources. Therefore, in this paper, a new resource‐providing model called “crowd‐funding” is proposed. In the crowd‐funding model, idle resources can be collected to form a virtual resource pool for providing cloud services. Based on this model, a new task scheduling algorithm is proposed, RC‐GA (genetic algorithm for task scheduling based on a resource crowd‐funding model). For crowd‐funding, the resources come from different heterogeneous devices, so the resource stability should be considered different. The scheduling targets of the RC‐GA are designed to increase the stability of task execution and reduce power consumption at the same time. In addition, to reduce random errors in the evolution process, the roulette wheel selection operator of the genetic algorithm is improved. The experiment shows that the RC‐GA can achieve good results.