Resource virtualization and service selection in cloud logistics

Cloud computing and Internet of Things have promoted a new logistics service mode, i.e., the cloud logistics mode. This work studies the resource virtualization and service encapsulation of a logistics center, and focuses on the technologies of resource expression and service encapsulation. After the resources of a logistics center are encapsulated in web services, how to find the “best” concrete web service among many is a critically important issue. This work considers service selection as an optimization problem and establishes a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based web service selection model with quality of service (QoS) constraints. It can be used to address the horizontal adaptation issues from the composite web services. The feasibility and effectiveness of the model are verified by several experiments.     

Packet aggregation based network I/O virtualization for cloud computing

Virtualization is a key technology to enable cloud computing. Driver domain based model for network virtualization offers isolation and high levels of flexibility. However, it suffers from poor performance and lacks scalability. In this paper, we evaluate networking performance of virtual machines within Xen. The I/O channel transferring packets between the driver domain and the virtual machines is shown to be the bottleneck. To overcome this limitation, we proposed a packet aggregation based mechanism to transfer packets from the driver domain to the virtual machines. Packet aggregation, combined with an efficient core allocation, allows virtual machines throughput to scale up by 700%, while minimizing both memory and CPU consumption. Besides, aggregation impact on packets delay and jitter remains acceptable. Hence, the proposed I/O virtualization model satisfies infrastructure providers to offer Cloud computing services.     

云计算虚拟化技术的发展与趋势

云计算是一种融合了多项计算机技术的以数据和处理能力为中心的密集型计算模式,其中以虚拟化、分布式数据存储、分布式并发编程模型、大规模数据管理和分布式资源管理技术最为关键。经过十多年的发展,云计算技术已经从发展培育期步入快速成长期,越来越多的企业已经开始使用云计算服务。与此同时,云计算的核心技术也在发生着巨大的变化,新一代的技术正在改进甚至取代前一代技术。容器虚拟化技术以其轻便、灵活和快速部署等特性对传统的基于虚拟机的虚拟化技术带来了颠覆性的挑战,正在改变着基础设施即服务（IaaS）平台和平台即服务（PaaS）平台的架构和实现。对容器虚拟化技术进行深入介绍,并通过分析和比较阐述容器虚拟化技术和虚拟机虚拟化技术各自的优势、适应场景和亟待解决的问题,然后对云计算虚拟化技术的下一步研究方向和发展趋势进行展望。     

CyberGuarder: A virtualization security assurance architecture for green cloud computing

As the sizes of IT infrastructure continue to grow, cloud computing is a natural extension of virtualisation technologies that enable scalable management of virtual machines over a plethora of physically connected systems. The so-called virtualisation-based cloud computing paradigm offers a practical approach to green IT/clouds, which emphasise the construction and deployment of scalable, energy-efficient network software applications (NetApp) by virtue of improved utilisation of the underlying resources. The latter is typically achieved through increased sharing of hardware and data in a multi-tenant cloud architecture/environment and, as such, accentuates the critical requirement for enhanced security services as an integrated component of the virtual infrastructure management strategy. This paper analyses the key security challenges faced by contemporary green cloud computing environments, and proposes a virtualisation security assurance architecture, CyberGuarder, which is designed to address several key security problems within the ‘green’ cloud computing context. In particular, CyberGuarder provides three different kinds of services; namely, a virtual machine security service, a virtual network security service and a policy based trust management service. Specifically, the proposed virtual machine security service incorporates a number of new techniques which include (1) a VMM-based integrity measurement approach for NetApp trusted loading, (2) a multi-granularity NetApp isolation mechanism to enable OS user isolation, and (3) a dynamic approach to virtual machine and network isolation for multiple NetApp’s based on energy-efficiency and security requirements. Secondly, a virtual network security service has been developed successfully to provide an adaptive virtual security appliance deployment in a NetApp execution environment, whereby traditional security services such as IDS and firewalls can be encapsulated as VM images and deployed over a virtual security network in accordance with the practical configuration of the virtualised infrastructure. Thirdly, a security service providing policy based trust management is proposed to facilitate access control to the resources pool and a trust federation mechanism to support/optimise task privacy and cost requirements across multiple resource pools. Preliminary studies of these services have been carried out on our iVIC platform, with promising results. As part of our ongoing research in large-scale, energy-efficient/green cloud computing, we are currently developing a virtual laboratory for our campus courses using the virtualisation infrastructure of iVIC, which incorporates the important results and experience of CyberGuarder in a practical context.     

Challenges in real-time virtualization and predictable cloud computing

Cloud computing and virtualization technology have revolutionized general-purpose computing applications in the past decade. The cloud paradigm offers advantages through reduction of operation costs, server consolidation, flexible system configuration and elastic resource provisioning. However, despite the success of cloud computing for general-purpose computing, existing cloud computing and virtualization technology face tremendous challenges in supporting emerging soft real-time applications such as online video streaming, cloud-based gaming, and telecommunication management. These applications demand real-time performance in open, shared and virtualized computing environments. This paper identifies the technical challenges in supporting real-time applications in the cloud, surveys recent advancement in real-time virtualization and cloud computing technology, and offers research directions to enable cloud-based real-time applications in the future.     

智能电网中虚拟化云计算的应用和安全技术分析

智能电网符合当前需求,意义重大。首先简单介绍了云计算和智能电网,并对云计算在智能电网中的应用做了阐述,然后主要对云计算的安全技术进行了分析。     

Efficient autonomic cloud computing using online discrete event simulation

Interest is growing in open source tools that let organizations build IaaS clouds using their own internal infrastructures, alone or in conjunction with external ones. A key component in such private/hybrid clouds is virtual infrastructure management, i.e., the dynamic orchestration of virtual machines, based on the understanding and prediction of performance at scale, with uncertain workloads and frequent node failures. Part of the research community is trying to solve this and other IaaS problems looking to Autonomic Computing techniques, that can provide, for example, better management of energy consumption, quality of service (QoS), and unpredictable system behaviors. In this context, we first recall the main features of the NAM framework devoted to the design of distributed autonomic systems. Then we illustrate the organization and policies of a NAM-based Workload Manager, focusing on one of its components, the Capacity Planner. We show that, when it is not possible to obtain optimal energy-aware plans analytically, sub-optimal plans can be autonomically obtained using online discrete event simulation. Specifically, the proposed approach allows to cope with a broader range of working conditions and types of workloads.     

A hybrid wavelet decomposer and GMDH-ELM ensemble model for Network function virtualization workload forecasting in cloud computing

Nowadays Network function virtualization (NFV) has drawn immense attention from many cloud providers because of its benefits. NFV enables networks to virtualize node functions such as firewalls, load balancers, and WAN accelerators, conventionally running on dedicated hardware, and instead implements them as virtual software components on standard servers, switches, and storages. In order to provide NFV resources and meet Service Level Agreement (SLA) conditions, minimize energy consumption and utilize physical resources efficiently, resource allocation in the cloud is an essential task. Since network traffic is changing rapidly, an optimized resource allocation strategy should consider resource auto-scaling property for NFV services. In order to scale cloud resources, we should forecast the NFV workload. Existing forecasting methods are providing poor results for highly volatile and fluctuating time series such as cloud workloads. Therefore, we propose a novel hybrid wavelet time series decomposer and GMDH-ELM ensemble method named Wavelet-GMDH-ELM (WGE) for NFV workload forecasting which predicts and ensembles workload in different time-frequency scales. We evaluate the WGE model with three real cloud workload traces to verify its prediction accuracy and compare it with state of the art methods. The results show the proposed method provides better average prediction accuracy. Especially it improves Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) at least 8% compared to the rival forecasting methods such as support vector regression (SVR) and Long short term memory (LSTM).     

Integrating QoS awareness with virtualization in cloud computing systems for delay-sensitive applications

Cloud computing provides scalable computing and storage resources over the Internet. These scalable resources can be dynamically organized as many virtual machines (VMs) to run user applications based on a pay-per-use basis. The required resources of a VM are sliced from a physical machine (PM) in the cloud computing system. A PM may hold one or more VMs. When a cloud provider would like to create a number of VMs, the main concerned issue is the VM placement problem, such that how to place these VMs at appropriate PMs to provision their required resources of VMs. However, if two or more VMs are placed at the same PM, there exists certain degree of interference between these VMs due to sharing non-sliceable resources, e.g. I/O resources. This phenomenon is called as the VM interference. The VM interference will affect the performance of applications running in VMs, especially the delay-sensitive applications. The delay-sensitive applications have quality of service (QoS) requirements in their data access delays. This paper investigates how to integrate QoS awareness with virtualization in cloud computing systems, such as the QoS-aware VM placement (QAVMP) problem. In addition to fully exploiting the resources of PMs, the QAVMP problem considers the QoS requirements of user applications and the VM interference reduction. Therefore, in the QAVMP problem, there are following three factors: resource utilization, application QoS, and VM interference. We first formulate the QAVMP problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model by integrating the three factors as the profit of cloud provider. Due to the computation complexity of the ILP model, we propose a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm to efficiently solve the QAVMP problem. In the heuristic algorithm, a bipartite graph is modeled to represent all the possible placement relationships between VMs and PMs. Then, the VMs are gradually placed at their preferable PMs to maximize the profit of cloud provider as much as possible. Finally, simulation experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic algorithm by comparing with other VM placement algorithms.     

云计算中的入侵检测模型

本文提出了一种云环境下的网络安全处理模型,模型中的每台云服务器都拥有自己的入侵检测系统,并且所有的服务器共享一个异常管理平台,该平台负责报警信息的接收、处理和日志管理.模型采用报警级别动态调整技术和攻击信息共享方法,最大限度地降低了漏报率和服务器遭受同种攻击的可能性,有效提高了检测效率和系统安全水平.     

Resource scheduling algorithm with load balancing for cloud service provisioning

Cloud computing uses scheduling and load balancing for virtualized file sharing in cloud infrastructure. These two have to be performed in an optimized manner in cloud computing environment to achieve optimal file sharing. Recently, Scalable traffic management has been developed in cloud data centers for traffic load balancing and quality of service provisioning. However, latency reducing during multidimensional resource allocation still remains a challenge. Hence, there necessitates efficient resource scheduling for ensuring load optimization in cloud. The objective of this work is to introduce an integrated resource scheduling and load balancing algorithm for efficient cloud service provisioning. The method constructs a Fuzzy-based Multidimensional Resource Scheduling model to obtain resource scheduling efficiency in cloud infrastructure. Increasing utilization of Virtual Machines through effective and fair load balancing is then achieved by dynamically selecting a request from a class using Multidimensional Queuing Load Optimization algorithm. A load balancing algorithm is then implemented to avoid underutilization and overutilization of resources, improving latency time for each class of request. Simulations were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness using Cloudsim simulator in cloud data centers and results shows that the proposed method achieves better performance in terms of average success rate, resource scheduling efficiency and response time. Simulation analysis shows that the method improves the resource scheduling efficiency by 7% and also reduces the response time by 35.5 % when compared to the state-of-the-art works.     

基于云计算的图书馆云服务模型研究

通过借鉴OCLC在云计算图书馆的设计思路以及基于云计算整合图书馆资源与日常服务的办法,提出了在云计算图书馆云服务的构建思路及其模型。     

云计算环境下的自适应资源管理技术综述

云环境下的自适应资源管理是当前云计算研究领域的热点问题,是云计算具备弹性扩展、动态分配和资源共享等特点的关键技术支撑,具有重要的理论意义和实用价值.其主要研究点包括:虚拟机放置优化算法,虚拟资源动态伸缩模型、多IDC间的全局云计算资源调度、全局资源配置及能力规划模型等.对云环境下自适应资源管理研究现状进行分析研究,并指出当前研究中存在的一些主要问题,同时进一步展望本领域未来的研究方向.     

A survey of cloud resource management for complex engineering applications

Traditionally, complex engineering applications (CEAs), which consist of numerous components (software) and require a large amount of computing resources, usually run in dedicated clusters or high performance computing (HPC) centers. Nowadays, Cloud computing system with the ability of providing massive computing resources and customizable execution environment is becoming an attractive option for CEAs. As a new type on Cloud applications, CEA also brings the challenges of dealing with Cloud resources. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of Cloud resource management research for CEAs. The survey puts forward two important questions: 1) what are the main challenges for CEAs to run in Clouds? and 2) what are the prior research topics addressing these challenges? We summarize and highlight the main challenges and prior research topics. Our work can be probably helpful to those scientists and engineers who are interested in running CEAs in Cloud environment.     

一种基于云计算的动态可扩展应用模型

可扩展性对于很多互联网企业而言是非常重要的。如果按照访问量峰值需求配置资源,则成本很高,资源利用率很低。云计算提供了一个强大的计算模式,允许用户按需访问资源。基于虚拟云计算环境中阈值,提出一个动态可扩展的Web应用模型,该模型通过一个前端负载平衡器,将用户的访问请求路由安装在云计算环境中虚拟机上的Web服务器上。又提出了一个动态扩展算法用于自动扩展虚拟服务器的数量。根据提出的模型和算法,通过实验模拟,当用户访问量激增时,系统的响应时间不会显著延长,完全可以满足实际的需求。     

虚拟化云计算数据中心资源节能调度算法研究

针对当前云计算数据中心资源调度过程耗时长、能耗高、数据传输准确性较低的问题,提出基于VR沉浸式的虚拟化云计算数据中心资源节能调度算法。构建云计算数据中心资源采样模型,结合虚拟现实(virtual reality,VR)互动装置输出、转换、调度中心资源,提取中心资源的关联规则特征量,采用嵌入式模糊聚类融合分析方法三维重构中心资源,建立虚拟化云计算数据中心资源的信息融合中心,采用决策相关性分析方法,结合差异化融合特征量实现对数据中心资源调度,实现虚拟化云计算数据中心资源实时节能调度。仿真结果表明,采用该方法进行虚拟化云计算数据中心资源节能调度的数据传输准确性较高,时间开销较短,能耗较低,在中心资源调度中具有很好的应用价值。     

CloudSim: a toolkit for modeling and simulation of cloud computing environments and evaluation of resource provisioning algorithms

Cloud computing is a recent advancement wherein IT infrastructure and applications are provided as ‘services’ to end‐users under a usage‐based payment model. It can leverage virtualized services even on the fly based on requirements (workload patterns and QoS) varying with time. The application services hosted under Cloud computing model have complex provisioning, composition, configuration, and deployment requirements. Evaluating the performance of Cloud provisioning policies, application workload models, and resources performance models in a repeatable manner under varying system and user configurations and requirements is difficult to achieve. To overcome this challenge, we propose CloudSim: an extensible simulation toolkit that enables modeling and simulation of Cloud computing systems and application provisioning environments. The CloudSim toolkit supports both system and behavior modeling of Cloud system components such as data centers, virtual machines (VMs) and resource provisioning policies. It implements generic application provisioning techniques that can be extended with ease and limited effort. Currently, it supports modeling and simulation of Cloud computing environments consisting of both single and inter‐networked clouds (federation of clouds). Moreover, it exposes custom interfaces for implementing policies and provisioning techniques for allocation of VMs under inter‐networked Cloud computing scenarios. Several researchers from organizations, such as HP Labs in U.S.A., are using CloudSim in their investigation on Cloud resource provisioning and energy‐efficient management of data center resources. The usefulness of CloudSim is demonstrated by a case study involving dynamic provisioning of application services in the hybrid federated clouds environment. The result of this case study proves that the federated Cloud computing model significantly improves the application QoS requirements under fluctuating resource and service demand patterns. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于膜计算的蝙蝠算法在云计算资源调度的研究

如何进一步实现云计算环境下的资源利用最大化是目前研究的热点.建立云计算环境下的资源分配模型,云计算资源调度使用蝙蝠算法,同时引入膜计算概念,提出一种基于膜计算的蝙蝠算法,将膜系统内部分解为主膜和辅助膜,在辅助膜内进行蝙蝠的个体局部寻优,将优化后的个体传送到主膜间进行全局优化,从而达到了云计算资源优化分配要求.通过CloudSim平台与其他算法进行仿真对比表明算法提高了云计算环境下的系统处理时间和效率,使得云计算环境下的资源分配更加合理.     

An imperialist competitive algorithm for virtual machine placement in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing, the recently emerged revolution in IT industry, is empowered by virtualisation technology. In this paradigm, the user’s applications run over some virtual machines (VMs). The process of selecting proper physical machines to host these virtual machines is called virtual machine placement. It plays an important role on resource utilisation and power efficiency of cloud computing environment. In this paper, we propose an imperialist competitive-based algorithm for the virtual machine placement problem called ICA-VMPLC. The base optimisation algorithm is chosen to be ICA because of its ease in neighbourhood movement, good convergence rate and suitable terminology. The proposed algorithm investigates search space in a unique manner to efficiently obtain optimal placement solution that simultaneously minimises power consumption and total resource wastage. Its final solution performance is compared with several existing methods such as grouping genetic and ant colony-based algorithms as well as bin packing heuristic. The simulation results show that the proposed method is superior to other tested algorithms in terms of power consumption, resource wastage, CPU usage efficiency and memory usage efficiency.