Application type based resource allocation strategy in cloud environment

Unreasonable resource allocation may shorten the service life of physical servers and affect the stability of the cloud data center. To solve this issue, a virtual machine (VM) allocation and placement strategy based on the types of applications is proposed. According to the strategy, appropriate VM is allocated based on the type of application. And the VM is placed on the server that the available resources is sufficient enough to support the application. Meanwhile, the load balance of the server is also considered when the VM is placed. Simulations on Cloudsim platform show that the performance of load balance of the VM placement strategy proposed is much better than that of the traditional VM placement strategy. And extensive experiments on cloudstack show that the VM placement strategy proposed is much more efficient than the traditional VM placement strategy in execution.     

HiCOO: Hierarchical cooperation for scalable communication in Global Address Space programming models on Cray XT systems

Global Address Space (GAS) programming models enable a convenient, shared-memory style addressing model. Typically this is realized through one-sided operations that can enable asynchronous communication and data movement. With the size of petascale systems reaching 10,000s of nodes and 100,000s of cores, the underlying runtime systems face critical challenges in (1) scalably managing resources (such as memory for communication buffers), and (2) gracefully handling unpredictable communication patterns and any associated contention. For any solution that addresses these resource scalability challenges, equally important is the need to maintain the performance of GAS programming models. In this paper, we describe a Hierarchical COOperation (HiCOO) architecture for scalable communication in GAS programming models. HiCOO formulates a cooperative communication architecture: with inter-node cooperation amongst multiple nodes (a.k.a multinode) and hierarchical cooperation among multinodes that are arranged in various virtual topologies. We have implemented HiCOO for a popular GAS runtime library, Aggregate Remote Memory Copy Interface (ARMCI). By extensively evaluating different virtual topologies in HiCOO in terms of their impact to memory scalability, network contention, and application performance, we identify MFCG as the most suitable virtual topology. The resulting HiCOO architecture is able to realize scalable resource management and achieve resilience to network contention, while at the same time maintaining or enhancing the performance of scientific applications. In one case, it reduces the total execution time of an NWChem application by 52%.     

An efficient energy-aware method for virtual machine placement in cloud data centers using the cultural algorithm

Excessive consumption of energy in cloud data centers whose number is increasing day by day has led to substantial problems. Hence, offering efficient schemes for virtual machine (VM) placement to decrease energy consumption in cloud computing environments has become a significant research field in recent years. In this paper, with the goal of reducing energy consumption in cloud data centers, we present a VM placement method using the cultural algorithm. In the proposed algorithm called balance-based cultural algorithm for virtual machine placement (BCAVMP), a new fitness function is introduced to evaluate VM allocation solutions. In this function, by using the sum of balance vector lengths for each VM placement, balanced utilization of resources is considered. Also, by applying the amount of energy usage in the fitness function, solutions with lower energy consumption are intended. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using CloudSim simulator. The simulation results indicate that by appropriate VM assignment and resource wastage reduction, energy consumption in cloud data centers can be decreased.

     

Exploiting ensemble techniques for automatic virtual machine clustering in cloud systems

Cloud computing has recently emerged as a new paradigm to provide computing services through large-size data centers where customers may run their applications in a virtualized environment. The advantages of cloud in terms of flexibility and economy encourage many enterprises to migrate from local data centers to cloud platforms, thus contributing to the success of such infrastructures. However, as size and complexity of cloud infrastructures grow, scalability issues arise in monitoring and management processes. Scalability issues are exacerbated because available solutions typically consider each virtual machine (VM) as a black box with independent characteristics, which is monitored at a fine-grained granularity level for management purposes, thus generating huge amounts of data to handle. We claim that scalability issues can be addressed by leveraging the similarity between VMs in terms of resource usage patterns. In this paper, we propose an automated methodology to cluster similar VMs starting from their resource usage information, assuming no knowledge of the software executed on them. This is an innovative methodology that combines the Bhattacharyya distance and ensemble techniques to provide a stable evaluation of similarity between probability distributions of multiple VM resource usage, considering both system- and network-related data. We evaluate the methodology through a set of experiments on data coming from an enterprise data center. We show that our proposal achieves high and stable performance in automatic VMs clustering, with a significant reduction in the amount of data collected which allows to lighten the monitoring requirements of a cloud data center.     

Profile-based dynamic application assignment with a repairing genetic algorithm for greener data centers

Data centers have become essential to modern society by catering to increasing number of Internet users and technologies. This results in significant challenges in terms of escalating energy consumption. Research on green initiatives that reduce energy consumption while maintaining performance levels is exigent for data centers. However, energy efficiency and resource utilization are conflicting in general. Thus, it is imperative to develop an application assignment strategy that maintains a trade-off between energy and quality of service. To address this problem, a profile-based dynamic energy management framework is presented in this paper for dynamic application assignment to virtual machines (VMs). It estimates application finishing times and addresses real-time issues in application resource provisioning. The framework implements a dynamic assignment strategy by a repairing genetic algorithm (RGA), which employs realistic profiles of applications, virtual machines and physical servers. The RGA is integrated into a three-layer energy management system incorporating VM placement to derive actual energy savings. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the dynamic approach to application management. The dynamic approach produces up to 48% better energy savings than existing application assignment approaches under investigated scenarios. It also performs better than the static application management approach with 10% higher resource utilization efficiency and lower degree of imbalance.     

Performance Surface Prediction for WAN-Based Clusters

The last five years have been a period of exponential growth in the number of machines connected to the Internet and the speed at which these machines communicate. The infrastructure is now in place to consider a nationwide cluster of workstations as a viable parallel processing platform. In order to achieve acceptable performance on this kind of a machine, performance prediction tools must provide information on where to place computational objects. Incorrect object placement can result in poor performance and congestion in the network. This research develops a new paradigm for predicting performance in the Wide Area Network (WAN) based cluster arena. Statistical samples of the performance of clusters and applications are used to build characteristic surfaces. These surfaces are then used to provide guidance in placement of new applications. This prediction method is intended to minimize both the execution time of the application and the impact of the application on the nationwide virtual machine. Performance prediction tools are an important prerequisite to effectively utilizing WAN based clusters.     

Adaptive Remus: adaptive checkpointing for Xen-based virtual machine replication

With the ever increasing dependence on computers and networks, many systems are required to be continuously available in order to fulfil their mission. Virtualization technology enables high availability to be offered in a convenient, cost-effective manner: with the encapsulation provided by virtual machines (VMs), entire systems can be replicated transparently in software, obviating the need for expensive fault-tolerant hardware. Remus is a VM replication mechanism for the Xen hypervisor that provides high availability despite crash failures. Replication is performed by checkpointing the VM at fixed intervals. However, there is an antagonism between processing and communication regarding the optimal checkpoint interval: while longer intervals benefit processor-intensive applications, shorter intervals favour network-intensive applications. Thus, any chosen interval may not always be suitable for the hosted applications, limiting Remus usage in many scenarios. This work introduces Adaptive Remus, a proposal for adaptive checkpointing in Remus that dynamically adjusts the replication frequency according to the characteristics of running applications. Experimental results indicate that our proposal improves performance for applications that require both processing and communication, without harming applications that use only one type of resource.     

云计算中基于多目标优化的动态资源配置方法

目前,云平台的大多数动态资源分配策略只考虑如何减少激活物理节点的数量来达到节能的目的,以实现绿色计算,但这些资源再配置方案很少考虑到虚拟机放置的稳定性。针对应用负载的动态变化特征,提出一种新的面向多虚拟机分布稳定性的基于多目标优化的动态资源配置方法,结合各应用负载的当前状态和未来的预测数据,综合考虑虚拟机重新放置的开销以及新虚拟机放置状态的稳定性,并设计了面向虚拟机分布稳定性的基于多目标优化的遗传算法（MOGANS）进行求解。仿真实验结果表明,相对于面向节能和多虚拟机重分布开销的遗传算法（GA-NN）,MOGANS得到的虚拟机分布方式的稳定时间是GA-NN的10.42倍;同时,MOGANS也较好权衡了多虚拟机分布的稳定性和新旧状态转换所需的虚拟机迁移开销之间的关系。     

Virtual machine cluster mobility in inter-cloud platforms

Modern cloud computing applications developed from different interoperable services that are interfacing with each other in a loose coupling approach. This work proposes the concept of the Virtual Machine (VM) cluster migration, meaning that services could be migrated to various clouds based on different constraints such as computational resources and better economical offerings. Since cloud services are instantiated as VMs, an application can be seen as a cluster of VMs that integrate its functionality. We focus on the VM cluster migration by exploring a more sophisticated method with regards to VM network configurations. In particular, networks are hard to managed because their internal setup is changed after a migration, and this is related with the configuration parameters during the re-instantiation to the new cloud platform. To address such issue, we introduce a Software Defined Networking (SDN) service that breaks the problem of network configuration into tractable pieces and involves virtual bridges instead of references to static endpoints. The architecture is modular, it is based on the SDN OpenFlow protocol and allows VMs to be paired in cluster groups that communicate with each other independently of the cloud platform that are deployed. The experimental analysis demonstrates migrations of VM clusters and provides a detailed discussion of service performance for different cases.     

An Optimization-Based Scheme for Efficient Virtual Machine Placement

According to the important methodology of convex optimization theory, the energy-efficient and scalability problems of modern data centers are studied. Then a novel virtual machine (VM) placement scheme is proposed for solving these problems in large scale. Firstly, by referring the definition of VM placement fairness and utility function, the basic algorithm of VM placement which fulfills server constraints of physical machines is discussed. Then, we abstract the VM placement as an optimization problem which considers the inherent dependencies and traffic between VMs. By given the structural differences of recently proposed data center architectures, we further investigate a comparative analysis on the impact of the network architectures, server constraints and application dependencies on the potential performance gain of optimization-based VM placement. Comparing with the existing schemes, the performance improvements are illustrated from multiple perspectives, such as reducing the number of physical machines deployment, decreasing communication cost between VMs, improving energy-efficient and scalability of data centers.     

Topology and Application Aware Dynamic VM Management in the Cloud

Cloud computing continues to mature and more applications continue to be deployed in public clouds. Client applications deployed in the cloud should automatically scale up and down to match changing workload demands, though they must be careful to ensure that sufficient resources are provisioned to achieve performance objectives. The cloud provider, on the other hand, attempts to reduce costs by reducing power consumption by consolidating load onto fewer, highly utilized machines. In this work, we introduce an algorithm that integrates both application autoscaling and dynamic virtual machine (VM) allocation into a single algorithm in order to achieve the goals of both cloud provider and client. Further, we consider multi-VM applications, such as multi-tiered web-based applications, and extend the integrated algorithm to take the network topology into account when placing or migrating applications. The goal is to reduce VM-to-VM communication latency; our focus is on trying to contain applications within the same racks. We evaluate our work through simulation, showing that the integrated algorithm can achieve better application performance with a significant reduction in virtual machine live migrations, and the topology-aware extension successfully places applications within a single rack.     

A loss aware scalable topology for photonic on chip interconnection networks

The demand for robust computation systems has led to the increment of the number of processing cores in current chips. As the number of processing cores increases, current electrical communication means can introduce serious challenges in system performance due to the restrictions in power consumption and communication bandwidth. Contemporary progresses in silicon nano-photonic technology have provided a suitable platform for constructing photonic communication links as an alternative for overcoming such problems. Topology is one of the most significant characteristics of photonic interconnection networks. In this paper, we have introduced a novel topology, aiming to reduce insertion loss in photonic networks; detailed analysis of the proposed topology has also been provided based on synthetic and real application benchmarks using a cycle-accurate simulation environment. Results demonstrate that the proposed topology outperforms other considered topologies in terms of physical-layer parameters, such as insertion loss, and provides better scalability. Moreover, such improvement in physical-layer parameters has caused system performance parameters to improve significantly. For instance, the topology yields an improvement of at least 406 % in bandwidth, compared to the best case, when leveraging synthetic traffic patterns. Furthermore, when using scientific applications, execution time and energy efficiency are improved up to 85 % and 97 %, respectively.     

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.     

VM3: Measuring,modeling and managing VM shared resources

With cloud and utility computing models gaining significant momentum, data centers are increasingly employing virtualization and consolidation as a means to support a large number of disparate applications running simultaneously on a chip-multiprocessor (CMP) server. In such environments, contention for shared platform resources (CPU cores, shared cache space, shared memory bandwidth, etc.) can have a significant effect on each virtual machine’s performance. In this paper, we investigate the shared resource contention problem for virtual machines by: (a) measuring the effects of shared platform resources on virtual machine performance, (b) proposing a model for estimating shared resource contention effects, and (c) proposing a transition from a virtual machine (VM) to a virtual platform architecture (VPA) that enables transparent shared resource management through architectural mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement. Our measurement and modeling experiments are based on a consolidation benchmark (vConsolidate) running on a state-of-the-art CMP server. Our virtual platform architecture experiments are based on detailed simulations of consolidation scenarios. Through detailed measurements and simulations, we show that shared resource contention affects virtual machine performance significantly and emphasize that virtual platform architectures is a must for future virtualized datacenters.     

DFA-VMP: An efficient and secure virtual machine placement strategy under cloud environment

The problem of Virtual Machine (VM) placement is critical to the security and efficiency of the cloud infrastructure. Nowadays most research focuses on the influences caused by the deployed VM on the data center load, energy consumption, resource loss, etc. Few works consider the security and privacy issues of the tenant data on the VM. For instance, as the application of virtualization technology, the VM from different tenants may be placed on one physical host. Hence, attackers may steal secrets from other tenants by using the side-channel attack based on the shared physical resources, which will threat the data security of the tenants in the cloud computing. To address the above issues, this paper proposes an efficient and secure VM placement strategy. Firstly, we define the related security and efficiency indices in the cloud computing system. Then, we establish a multi-objective constraint optimization model for the VM placement considering the security and performance of the system, and find resolution towards this model based on the discrete firefly algorithm. The experimental results in OpenStack cloud platform indicates that the above strategy can effectively reduce the possibility of malicious tenants and targeted tenants on the same physical node, and reduce energy consumption and resource loss at the data center.     

Towards a green cluster through dynamic remapping of virtual machines

Since power is one of the major limiting factors for a data center or for large cluster growth, the objective of this study is to minimize the power consumption of the cluster without violating the performance constraints of the applications. We propose a runtime virtual machine (VM) mapping framework in a cluster or data center to save energy. The new framework can make reconfiguration decisions on time with the consideration of a low influence on the performance. In the GreenMap framework, one probabilistic, heuristic algorithm is designed for the optimization problem: mapping VMs onto a set of physical machines (PMs) under the constraint of multi-dimensional resource consumptions. Experimental measurements show that the new method can reduce the power consumption by up to 69.2% over base, with few performance penalties. The effectiveness and performance insights are also analytically verified.     

Dynamic cloud resource management for efficient media applications in mobile computing environments

Single-instruction-set architecture (Single-ISA) heterogeneous multi-core processors (HMP) are superior to Symmetric Multi-core processors in performance per watt. They are popular in many aspects of the Internet of Things, including mobile multimedia cloud computing platforms. One Single-ISA HMP integrates both fast out-of-order cores and slow simpler cores, while all cores are sharing the same ISA. The quality of service (QoS) is most important for virtual machine (VM) resource management in multimedia mobile computing, particularly in Single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core cloud computing platforms. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a dynamic cloud resource management (DCRM) policy to improve the QoS in multimedia mobile computing. DCRM dynamically and optimally partitions shared resources according to service or application requirements. Moreover, DCRM combines resource-aware VM allocation to maximize the effectiveness of the heterogeneous multi-core cloud platform. The basic idea for this performance improvement is to balance the shared resource allocations with these resources requirements. The experimental results show that DCRM behaves better in both response time and QoS, thus proving that DCRM is good at shared resource management in mobile media cloud computing.     

基于Xen虚拟机的内存资源实时监控与按需调整

在虚拟计算环境中,难以实时地监控与分配内存资源。针对以上问题,基于Xen虚拟计算环境,提出一种能够实时监控Xen虚拟机内存(VMM)使用情况的XMMC方法并进行了实现。所提方法运用Xen虚拟机提供的超级调用,其不仅能实时地监控虚拟机内存使用情况,而且能实时动态按需分配虚拟机内存。实验结果表明,XMMC方法对虚拟机应用程序造成的性能损失很小,低于5%;能够对客户虚拟机的内存资源占用情况进行实时的监测与按需调整,为多虚拟机的管理提供方便。     

Self-Adaptive Resource Management for Large-Scale Shared Clusters

In a shared cluster, each application runs on a subset of nodes and these subsets can overlap with one another. Resource management in such a cluster should adaptively change the application placement and workload assignment to satisfy the dynamic applications workloads and optimize the resource usage. This becomes a challenging problem with the cluster scale and application amount growing large. This paper proposes a novel self-adaptive resource management approach which is inspired from human market: the nodes trade their shares of applications' requests with others via auction and bidding to decide its own resource allocation and a global high-quality resource allocation is achieved as an emergent collective behavior of the market. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can ensure quick responsiveness, high scalability, and application prioritization in addition to managing the resources effectively.     

Low‐latency Java communication devices on RDMA‐enabled networks

Providing high‐performance inter‐node communication is a key capability for running high performance computing applications efficiently on parallel architectures. In fact, current systems deployments are aggregating a significant number of cores interconnected via advanced networking hardware with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) mechanisms, that enable zero‐copy and kernel‐bypass features. The use of Java for parallel programming is becoming more promising thanks to some useful characteristics of this language, particularly its built‐in multithreading support, portability, easy‐to‐learn properties, and high productivity, along with the continuous increase in the performance of the Java virtual machine. However, current parallel Java applications generally suffer from inefficient communication middleware, mainly based on protocols with high communication overhead that do not take full advantage of RDMA‐enabled networks. This paper presents efficient low‐level Java communication devices that overcome these constraints by fully exploiting the underlying RDMA hardware, providing low‐latency and high‐bandwidth communications for parallel Java applications. The performance evaluation conducted on representative RDMA networks and parallel systems has shown significant point‐to‐point performance increases compared with previous Java communication middleware, allowing to obtain up to 40% improvement in application‐level performance on 4096 cores of a Cray XE6 supercomputer. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.