Performance assessment and tuning for exchange of clinical documents cross healthcare enterprises

BackgroundTo integrate electronic health records (EHRs) from diverse document sources across healthcare providers, facilities, or medical institutions, the IHE XDS.b profile can be considered as one of the solutions. In this research, we have developed an EHR/OpenXDS system which adopted the OpenXDS, an open source software that complied with the IHE XDS.b profile, and which achieved the EHR interoperability.ObjectiveWe conducted performance testing to investigate the performance and limitations of this EHR/OpenXDS system.MethodologyThe performance testing was conducted for three use cases, EHR submission, query, and retrieval, based on the IHE XDS.b profile for EHR sharing. In addition, we also monitored the depletion of hardware resources (including the CPU usage, memory usage, and network usage) during the test cases execution to detect more details of the EHR/OpenXDS system's limitations.ResultsIn this EHR/OpenXDS system, the maximum affordable workload of the EHR submissions were 400 EHR submissions per hour, the DSA CPU usage was 20%, memory usage was 1380 MB, the network usages were 0.286 KB input and 7.58 KB output per minute; the DPA CPU usage was 1%, memory usage was 1770 MB, the network usages were 7.75 KB input and 1.54 KB output per minute; the DGA CPU usage was 24%, memory usage was 2130 MB, the network usages were 1.3 KB input and 0.174 KB output per minute. The maximum affordable workload of the EHR queries were 600 EHR queries per hour, the DCA CPU usage was 66%, the memory usage was 1660 MB, the network usages were 0.230 KB input and 0.251 KB output per minute; the DGA CPU usage was 1%, the memory usage was 1890 MB, the network usages were 0.273 KB input and 0.22 KB output per minute. The maximum affordable workload of the EHR retrievals were 2000 EHR retrievals, the DCA CPU usage was 79%, the memory usage was 1730 MB, the network usages were 19.55 KB input and 1.12 KB output per minute; the DPA CPU usage was 3.75%, the memory usage was 2310 MB, and the network usages were 0.956 KB input and 19.57 KB output per minute.Discussion and conclusionFrom the research results, we suggest that future implementers who deployed the EHR/OpenXDS system should consider the following aspects. First, to ensure how many service volumes would be provided in the environment and then to adjust the hardware resources. Second, the IHE XDS.b profile is adopted by the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web service, it might then move onto the Restful (representational state transfer) web service which is more efficient than the SOAP web service. Third, the concurrency process ability should be added in the OpenXDS source code to improve the hardware usage more efficiently while processing the ITI-42, ITI-18, and ITI-43 transactions. Four, this research suggests that the work should continue on adjusting the memory usage for the modules of the OpenXDS thereby using the memory resource more efficiently, e.g., the memory configuration of the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), Apache Tomcat, and Apache Axis2. Fifth, to consider if the hardware monitoring would be required in the implementing environment. These research results provided some test figures to refer to, and it also gave some tuning suggestions and future works to continue improving the performance of the OpenXDS.     

Dynamic cluster resource allocations for jobs with known andunknown memory demands

The cluster system we consider for load sharing is a compute farm which is a pool of networked server nodes providing high-performance computing for CPU-intensive, memory-intensive, and I/O active jobs in a batch mode. Existing resource management systems mainly target at balancing the usage of CPU loads among server nodes. With the rapid advancement of CPU chips, memory and disk access speed improvements significantly lag behind advancement of CPU speed, increasing the penalty for data movement, such as page faults and I/O operations, relative to normal CPU operations. Aiming at reducing the memory resource contention caused by page faults and I/O activities, we have developed and examined load sharing policies by considering effective usage of global memory in addition to CPU load balancing in clusters. We study two types of application workloads: 1) Memory demands are known in advance or are predictable and 2) memory demands are unknown and dynamically changed during execution. Besides using workload traces with known memory demands, we have also made kernel instrumentation to collect different types of workload execution traces to capture dynamic memory access patterns. Conducting different groups of trace-driven simulations, we show that our proposed policies can effectively improve overall job execution performance by well utilizing both CPU and memory resources with known and unknown memory demands     

基于数据库负载的SQL能耗预测模型

传统数据库以性能(吞吐量、响应时间)为首要优化目标,忽略了数据库系统的能量消耗。在一味追求性能的同时,高能耗问题日益突出,为数据库负载构建能耗模型是构建绿色数据库的基础。通过量化查询负载执行过程中对系统资源(CPU与磁盘)的消耗,将资源消耗产生的时间代价和功耗代价转化为时间代价预测模型和功率代价预测模型,在单站点数据库服务器上实现了为数据库系统构建资源单位代价统一的能耗预测模型。采用多元线性回归工具拟合模型的重要参数,实验结果验证了能耗预测模型的可行性;并分别在静态与动态的系统环境下对系统不同类型查询负载的能耗进行预测与评价,验证了该模型的准确性,使得提出的能耗模型适合于构建能耗感知的绿色数据库。     

云计算资源调度研究综述

资源调度是云计算的一个主要研究方向.首先对云计算资源调度的相关研究现状进行深入调查和分析;然后重点讨论以降低云计算数据中心能耗为目标的资源调度方法、以提高系统资源利用率为目标的资源管理方法、基于经济学的云资源管理模型,给出最小能耗的云计算资源调度模型和最小服务器数量的云计算资源调度模型,并深入分析和比较现有的云资源调度方法;最后指出云计算资源管理的未来重要研究方向:基于预测的资源调度、能耗与性能折衷的调度、面向不同应用负载的资源管理策略与机制、面向计算能力(CPU、内存)和网络带宽的综合资源分配、多目标优化的资源调度,以便为云计算研究提供有益的参考.     

负载类型相关的Xen虚拟机系统性能模型

针对Xen虚拟机系统执行网络I/O密集型负载时容易耗尽Domain0的CPU资源而过载和执行计算密集型负载时在客户域平均性能与数目之间存在线性规划的问题,提出了两个负载类型相关的性能模型。首先,通过分析Xen虚拟机系统处理网络I/O操作的CPU资源消耗规律,建立了CPU核共享和CPU核隔离两种情况下的客户域网络I/O操作请求次数计算模型;然后,通过分析多个相同客户域并行执行计算密集型负载的平均性能与一个相同客户域执行相同负载的性能表现之间的关系,建立了并行执行计算密集型负载的客户域平均性能分析模型。实验结果表明,两个性能模型能够有效地限制客户域提交的网络I/O操作请求次数以防止Xen虚拟机系统过载,并求解给定资源配置情况下执行计算密集型负载的Xen虚拟机系统客户域伸缩性数目。     

Heterogeneity and thermal aware adaptive heuristics for energy efficient consolidation of virtual machines in infrastructure clouds

Holistic datacenter energy minimization operation should consider interactions between computing and cooling source specific usage patterns. Decisions like workload type, server configuration, load, utilization etc., contributes to power consumption and influences datacenter's thermal profile and impacts the energy required to control temperature within operational thresholds. In this paper, we present an adaptive virtual machine placement and consolidation approach to improve energy efficiency of a cloud datacenter; accounting for server heterogeneity, server processor low-power SLEEP state, state transition latency and integrated thermal controls to maintain datacenter within operational temperature. Our proposed heuristic approach reduces energy consumption with acceptable level of performance.     

云环境下虚拟机集群系统动态负载均衡机制

针对传统的物理集群系统无法灵活应对大型互联网应用的问题,提出一种云环境下虚拟机集群的综合负载均衡机制。该方法首先定期地采集集群中虚拟机节点的CPU、内存、连接数、响应时间,以及所在物理主机的负载状况等指标信息,然后加权计算节点的综合负载并得出其权值,最后通过调度器进行任务请求的合理分配,从而解决了传统集群系统负载不均且不能适应多变的网络环境等诸多问题。实验结果表明,与加权轮询法(WRR)和加权最少连接法(WLC)调度方案相比,该机制能够在并发量较大时维持较低的响应时间,并能够根据集群中综合负载的状态实时地增加或减少虚拟机数量,通常在5s之内达到整体集群的负载均衡。     

基于负载高峰特征的虚拟机放置算法

提出了一种基于虚拟机负载高峰特征的虚拟机放置策略,通过更好地复用物理主机资源来实现资源共享,从而提高资源利用率.在云环境下,当多个虚拟机的负载高峰出现在相同的时间段内时,非高峰时段的资源利用率就会明显偏低;相反,多个虚拟机只要负载高峰能错开在不同的时间,闲置的资源就能更充分地被利用.由于应用的负载通常具有一定的周期性,因此,可以利用虚拟机负载的历史数据作为分析的依据.基于虚拟机的负载高峰特征对虚拟机负载进行建模,建立虚拟机负载之间的相似度矩阵来实现虚拟机联合放置.使用CloudSim模拟实现了所提出的算法,并与基于相关系数的放置算法、随机放置算法进行了比较.实验结果表明:所提算法在平均CPU利用率上有8.9%~12.4%的提高,主机使用量有8.2%~11.0%的节省.     

Characterization of the Impact of Hardware Islands on OLTP

Modern hardware is abundantly parallel and increasingly heterogeneous. The numerous processing cores have non-uniform access latencies to the main memory and processor caches, which causes variability in the communication costs. Unfortunately, database systems mostly assume that all processing cores are the same and that microarchitecture differences are not significant enough to appear in critical database execution paths. As we demonstrate in this paper, however, non-uniform core topology does appear in the critical path and conventional database architectures achieve suboptimal and even worse, unpredictable performance. We perform a detailed performance analysis of OLTP deployments in servers with multiple cores per CPU (multicore) and multiple CPUs per server (multisocket). We compare different database deployment strategies where we vary the number and size of independent database instances running on a single server, from a single shared-everything instance to fine-grained shared-nothing configurations. We quantify the impact of non-uniform hardware on various deployments by (a) examining how efficiently each deployment uses the available hardware resources and (b) measuring the impact of distributed transactions and skewed requests on different workloads. We show that no strategy is optimal for all cases and that the best choice depends on the combination of hardware topology and workload characteristics. Finally, we argue that transaction processing systems must be aware of the hardware topology in order to achieve predictably high performance.     

虚拟机资源概率配置的云计算SEFFD算法

摘要：为增强虚拟机资源分配过程性能,有效解决云计算环境下虚拟资源分配的NP hard问题,利用模拟进化算法结合首次下降算法构建虚拟资源分配优化过程（SEFFD）。首先,构建全新的虚拟资源分配的评估方式,并结合模拟进化过程较强的算法寻优爬坡效果,采用迭代方式实现虚拟资源分配过程的个体选择、评估以及排序进化;其次,以模拟进化（SE）过程所获得资源分配结果为基础,结合首次下降（FFD）算法准则,实现物理主机及虚拟机资源的二次分配,从而获得资源分配效果和效率的同步提升;最后,利用CloundSim及Gridbus云计算仿真平台对算法性能进行对比测试,实验结果表明所提策略的内存利用率高于60%,处理器利用率大于55%,可有效减少所需物理主机数量,从而降低能耗。     

A unified benchmarking and model-based framework for building QoS-aware streaming media services

A number of technology and workload trends motivate us to consider the appropriate resource allocation mechanisms and policies for streaming media services in shared cluster environments. We present MediaGuard – a model-based infrastructure for building streaming media services – that can efficiently determine the fraction of server resources required to support a particular client request over its expected lifetime. The proposed solution is based on a unified cost function that uses a single value to reflect overall resource requirements such as the CPU, disk, memory, and bandwidth necessary to support a particular media stream based on its bit rate and whether it is likely to be served from memory or disk. We design a novel, time-segment-based memory model of a media server to efficiently determine in linear time whether a request will incur memory or disk access when given the history of previous accesses and the behavior of the server's main memory file buffer cache. Using the MediaGuard framework, we design two media services: (1) an efficient and accurate admission control service for streaming media servers that accounts for the impact of the server's main memory file buffer cache, and (2) a shared streaming media hosting service that can efficiently allocate the predefined shares of server resources to the hosted media services, while providing performance isolation and QoS guarantees among the hosted services. Our evaluation shows that, relative to a pessimistic admission control policy that assumes that all content must be served from disk, MediaGuard (as well as services that are built using it) deliver a factor of two improvement in server throughput.     

Resource pool management: Reactive versus proactive or let’s be friends

The consolidation of multiple workloads and servers enables the efficient use of server and power resources in shared resource pools. We employ a trace-based workload placement controller that uses historical information to periodically and proactively reassign workloads to servers subject to their quality of service objectives. A reactive migration controller is introduced that detects server overload and underload conditions. It initiates the migration of workloads when the demand for resources exceeds supply. Furthermore, it dynamically adds and removes servers to maintain a balance of supply and demand for capacity while minimizing power usage. A host load simulation environment is used to evaluate several different management policies for the controllers in a time effective manner. A case study involving three months of data for 138 SAP applications compares three integrated controller approaches with the use of each controller separately. The study considers trade-offs between: (i) required capacity and power usage, (ii) resource access quality of service for CPU and memory resources, and (iii) the number of migrations. Our study sheds light on the question of whether a reactive controller or proactive workload placement controller alone is adequate for resource pool management. The results show that the most tightly integrated controller approach offers the best results in terms of capacity and quality but requires more migrations per hour than the other strategies.     

面向托管的数据库即服务系统及资源优化技术

数据库即服务（DBaaS）是云计算的一个研究热点,而数据应用托管则是当前DBaaS的一个重要应用领域。为满足行业数据应用托管中对DBaaS提出的数据隔离、性能隔离及可靠性保障等方面的要求,提出一种无共享架构下基于虚拟机、支持副本的多租户数据托管方法及相应的数据库即服务系统。针对该系统中面向租户的虚拟机资源（CPU、内存等）动态优化这一核心问题,建立了基于虚拟机的系统资源效用函数和数据库性能计算模型,并在基础上给出了一种根据租户数据请求负载并采用贪心方式的虚拟机资源动态优化算法。结合科技信息服务数据库托管应用示例进行了实验,实验结果表明提出的方法可以根据各个租户的数据库负载动态优化虚拟机的资源分配,能够在满足性能需求同时达到了提高系统资源利用率的目的。     

Managing database server performance to meet QoS requirements in electronic commerce systems

The performance of electronic commerce systems has a major impact on their acceptability to users. Different users also demand different levels of performance from the system, that is, they will have different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Electronic commerce systems are the integration of several different types of servers and each server must contribute to meeting the QoS demands of the users. In this paper we focus on the role, and the performance, of a database server within an electronic commerce system. We examine the characteristics of the workload placed on a database server by an electronic commerce system and suggest a range of QoS requirements for the database server based on this analysis of the workload. We argue that a database server must be able to dynamically reallocate its resources in order to meet the QoS requirements of different transactions as the workload changes. We describe Quartermaster, which is a system to support dynamic goal-oriented resource management in database management systems, and discuss how it can be used to help meet the QoS requirements of the electronic commerce database server. We provide an example of the use of Quartermaster that illustrates how the dynamic reallocation of memory resources can be used to meet the QoS requirements of a set of transactions similar to transactions found in an electronic commerce workload. We briefly describe the memory reallocation algorithms used by Quartermaster and present experiments to show the impact of the reallocations on the performance of the transactions. Published online: 22 August 2001     

移动平台Android操作系统虚拟化技术的实现

虚拟化技术的研究正逐渐从服务器端转向移动智能设备领域。现有的虚拟化架构需要在物理硬件层和虚拟系统间进行大量的指令翻译,开销大,效率低。针对这一问题,提出了一种轻量级的移动操作系统虚拟化架构。通过在Linux内核命名空间机制的基础上扩展Driver命名空间框架,实现了多个虚拟Android系统的同时运行。此外,针对多个虚拟系统同时访问一套硬件设备发生冲突的问题,设计了通用的active-inactive模型来保证虚拟系统间对硬件设备的隔离复用。实验结果表明,虚拟后的Android系统在CPU使用率上并没有增加额外的开销,在内存使用量上减少了6.7%,此虚拟化架构具有很好的通用性与实用性。     

大数据云中心虚拟机资源高效分配应用研究

为降低大数据云中心的能量消耗和实现资源的优化配置,提出一种虚拟机资源高效分配策略;提出的策略对选定的特征上具备相似性任务分组的聚类进行定义,将各组任务映射到定制化的高效虚拟机类型;其高效指的是以最低限度的资源损耗成功执行任务;虚拟机的相关参数为核数量、内存量和存储量;虚拟机分配基于日志中提取的历史数据,并以任务的使用模式为基础;提出的资源分配策略以任务的实际资源使用量为基础,实现了能源消耗的降低;实验结果表明:不同聚类任务下,提出的虚拟机资源分配策略可以大幅节约能源消耗,具有较低的平均任务拒绝次数。     

FC2Q: exploiting fuzzy control in server consolidation for cloud applications with SLA constraints

Modern cloud data centers rely on server consolidation (the allocation of several virtual machines on the same physical host) to minimize their costs. Choosing the right consolidation level (how many and which virtual machines are assigned to a physical server) is a challenging problem, because contemporary multitier cloud applications must meet service level agreements in face of highly dynamic, nonstationary, and bursty workloads. In this paper, we deal with the problem of achieving the best consolidation level that can be attained without violating application service level agreements. We tackle this problem by devising fuzzy controller for consolidation and QoS (FC2Q), a resource management framework exploiting feedback fuzzy logic control, that is able to dynamically adapt the physical CPU capacity allocated to the tiers of an application in order to precisely match the needs induced by the intensity of its current workload. We implement FC2Q on a real testbed and use this implementation to demonstrate its ability of meeting the aforementioned goals by means of a thorough experimental evaluation, carried out with real‐world cloud applications and workloads. Furthermore, we compare the performance achieved by FC2Q against those attained by existing state‐of‐the‐art alternative solutions, and we show that FC2Q works better than them in all the considered experimental scenarios. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Power and performance control of soft real-time web server clusters

This paper presents a novel way to control power consumption and performance in a multi-tier server cluster designed for e-commerce applications. The requests submitted to these server systems have a soft real-time constraint, given that although some can miss a pre-defined deadline, the system can still meet an agreed upon performance level. Clusters of servers are extensively used nowadays and, with the steep increase in the total power consumption in these systems, economic and environmental problems have been raised. We present ways of decreasing power expenditure, and show the implementation of a SISO (Single Input Single Output) controller that acts on the speed of all server nodes capable of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), with QoS (Quality of Service) being the reference setpoint. For QoS, we use the request tardiness, defined as the ratio of the end-to-end response time to the deadline, rather than the usual metric that counts missed deadlines. We adjust the servers operating frequencies to guarantee that a pre-defined p-quantile of the tardiness probability distribution of the requests meet their deadlines. Doing so we can guarantee that the QoS will be statistically p. We test this technique in a prototype multi-tier cluster, using open software, commodity hardware, and a standardized e-commerce application to generate a workload close to that of the real world. The main contribution of this paper is to empirically show the robustness of the SISO controller, presenting a sensibility analysis of its parameters. Experimental results show that our implementation outperforms other published state-of-the-art cluster implementations.     

一种基于节的视频服务器允许接纳控制算法

提出了一种基于“服务器节”的支持压缩多媒体流的服务器中CPU、磁盘、网络和内存等资源管理的方法和允许接纳控制算法。“服务器节”概念定义了一组客户视频服务特性,如播放、快进、慢进和暂停等,并且确定了视频服务所需资源的分配参。一个“服务器节”包括视频服务器、磁盘设备、网络设备和允许接纳控制。它不但能优化使用单个资源,对于给定系统支持最大数量的客户端,保证其服务质量（QoS),而且其允许接纳控制算法能根据系统所有资源的状况,在不影响原有的视频服务基础上,确定对客户端新提出的视频服务是否接受。     

Joint computation offloading and resource provisioning for edge-cloud computing environment: A machine learning-based approach

In recent years, the usage of smart mobile applications to facilitate day-to-day activities in various domains for enhancing the quality of human life has increased widely. With rapid developments of smart mobile applications, the edge computing paradigm has emerged as a distributed computing solution to support serving these applications closer to mobile devices. Since the submitted workloads to the smart mobile applications changes over the time, decision making about offloading and edge server provisioning to handle the dynamic workloads of mobile applications is one of the challenging issues into the resource management scope. In this work, we utilized learning automata as a decision-maker to offload the incoming dynamic workloads into the edge or cloud servers. In addition, we propose an edge server provisioning approach using long short-term memory model to estimate the future workload and reinforcement learning technique to make an appropriate scaling decision. The simulation results obtained under real and synthetic workloads demonstrate that the proposed solution increases the CPU utilization and reduces the execution time and energy consumption, compared with the other algorithms.