A Survey on Load Balancing Algorithms for VM Placement in Cloud Computing

The emergence of cloud computing based on virtualization technologies brings huge opportunities to host virtual resource at low cost without the need of owning any infrastructure. Virtualization technologies enable users to acquire, configure and be charged on pay-per-use basis. However, Cloud data centers mostly comprise heterogeneous commodity servers hosting multiple virtual machines (VMs) with potential various specifications and fluctuating resource usages, which may cause imbalanced resource utilization within servers that may lead to performance degradation and service level agreements (SLAs) violations. To achieve efficient scheduling, these challenges should be addressed and solved by using load balancing strategies, which have been proved to be NP-hard problem. From multiple perspectives, this work identifies the challenges and analyzes existing algorithms for allocating VMs to PMs in infrastructure Clouds, especially focuses on load balancing. A detailed classification targeting load balancing algorithms for VM placement in cloud data centers is investigated and the surveyed algorithms are classified according to the classification. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and comparative understanding of existing literature and aid researchers by providing an insight for potential future enhancements.Comment: 22 Pages, 4 Figures, 4 Tables, in pres

A public transport bus assignment problem: parallel metaheuristics assessment

Combinatorial Optimization Problems occur in a wide variety of contexts and generally are NP-hard problems. At a corporate level solving this problems is of great importance since they contribute to the optimization of operational costs. In this thesis we propose to solve the Public Transport Bus Assignment problem considering an heterogeneous fleet and line exchanges, a variant of the Multi-Depot Vehicle Scheduling Problem in which additional constraints are enforced to model a real life scenario. The number of constraints involved and the large number of variables makes impracticable solving to optimality using complete search techniques. Therefore, we explore metaheuristics, that sacrifice optimality to produce solutions in feasible time. More concretely, we focus on the development of algorithms based on a sophisticated metaheuristic, Ant-Colony Optimization (ACO), which is based on a stochastic learning mechanism. For complex problems with a considerable number of constraints, sophisticated metaheuristics may fail to produce quality solutions in a reasonable amount of time. Thus, we developed parallel shared-memory (SM) synchronous ACO algorithms, however, synchronism originates the straggler problem. Therefore, we proposed three SM asynchronous algorithms that break the original algorithm semantics and differ on the degree of concurrency allowed while manipulating the learned information. Our results show that our sequential ACO algorithms produced better solutions than a Restarts metaheuristic, the ACO algorithms were able to learn and better solutions were achieved by increasing the amount of cooperation (number of search agents). Regarding parallel algorithms, our asynchronous ACO algorithms outperformed synchronous ones in terms of speedup and solution quality, achieving speedups of 17.6x. The cooperation scheme imposed by asynchronism also achieved a better learning rate than the original one

Statistical Performance Analysis of an Ant-Colony Optimisation Application in S-NET

Kenneth MacKenzie, Philip K. F. Hölzenspies, Kevin Hammond, Raimund Kirner, Vu Thien Nga Nguyen, Iraneus te Boekhorst, Clemens Grelck, Raphael Poss, Merijn Verstraaten, 'Statistical Performance Analysis of an Ant-Colony Optimisation Application in S-NET'. Paper presented at the 2nd Workshop on Feedback-Directed Compiler Optimization for Multi-Core Architectures. Berlin, Germany, 12 January 2013.We consider an ant-colony optimsation problem implemented on a multicore system as a collection of asynchronous stream- processing components under the control of the S-NET coordina- tion language. Statistical analysis and visualisation techniques are used to study the behaviour of the application, and this enables us to discover and correct problems in both the application program and the run-time system underlying S-NET

Evaluating Scalable Distributed Erlang for Scalability and Reliability

Large scale servers with hundreds of hosts and tens of thousands of cores are becoming common. To exploit these platforms software must be both scalable and reliable, and distributed actor languages like Erlang are a proven technology in this area. While distributed Erlang conceptually supports the engineering of large scale reliable systems, in practice it has some scalability limits that force developers to depart from the standard language mechanisms at scale. In earlier work we have explored these scalability limitations, and addressed them by providing a Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang library that partitions the network of Erlang Virtual Machines (VMs) into scalable groups (s_groups). This paper presents the first systematic evaluation of SD Erlang s_groups and associated tools, and how they can be used. We present a comprehensive evaluation of the scalability and reliability of SD Erlang using three typical benchmarks and a case study. We demonstrate that s_groups improve the scalability of reliable and unreliable Erlang applications on up to 256 hosts (6,144 cores). We show that SD Erlang preserves the class-leading distributed Erlang reliability model, but scales far better than the standard model. We present a novel, systematic, and tool-supported approach for refactoring distributed Erlang applications into SD Erlang. We outline the new and improved monitoring, debugging and deployment tools for large scale SD Erlang applications. We demonstrate the scaling characteristics of key tools on systems comprising up to 10 K Erlang VMs

Cloud Service Selection System Approach based on QoS Model: A Systematic Review

The Internet of Things (IoT) has received a lot of interest from researchers recently. IoT is seen as a component of the Internet of Things, which will include billions of intelligent, talkative "things" in the coming decades. IoT is a diverse, multi-layer, wide-area network composed of a number of network links. The detection of services and on-demand supply are difficult in such networks, which are comprised of a variety of resource-limited devices. The growth of service computing-related fields will be aided by the development of new IoT services. Therefore, Cloud service composition provides significant services by integrating the single services. Because of the fast spread of cloud services and their different Quality of Service (QoS), identifying necessary tasks and putting together a service model that includes specific performance assurances has become a major technological problem that has caused widespread concern. Various strategies are used in the composition of services i.e., Clustering, Fuzzy, Deep Learning, Particle Swarm Optimization, Cuckoo Search Algorithm and so on. Researchers have made significant efforts in this field, and computational intelligence approaches are thought to be useful in tackling such challenges. Even though, no systematic research on this topic has been done with specific attention to computational intelligence. Therefore, this publication provides a thorough overview of QoS-aware web service composition, with QoS models and approaches to finding future aspects

Comparing metaheuristic algorithms for error detection in Java programs

Chicano, F., Ferreira M., & Alba E. (2011). Comparing Metaheuristic Algorithms for Error Detection in Java Programs. In Proceedings of Search Based Software Engineering, Szeged, Hungary, September 10-12, 2011. pp. 82–96.Model checking is a fully automatic technique for checking concurrent software properties in which the states of a concurrent system are explored in an explicit or implicit way. The main drawback of this technique is the high memory consumption, which limits the size of the programs that can be checked. In the last years, some researchers have focused on the application of guided non-complete stochastic techniques to the search of the state space of such concurrent programs. In this paper, we compare five metaheuristic algorithms for this problem. The algorithms are Simulated Annealing, Ant Colony Optimization, Particle Swarm Optimization and two variants of Genetic Algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that Simulated Annealing has been applied to the problem. We use in the comparison a benchmark composed of 17 Java concurrent programs. We also compare the results of these algorithms with the ones of deterministic algorithms.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. This research has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and FEDER under contract TIN2008-06491-C04-01 (the M∗ project) and the Andalusian Government under contract P07-TIC-03044 (DIRICOM project)

Hybrid scheduling algorithms in cloud computing: a review

Cloud computing is one of the emerging fields in computer science due to its several advancements like on-demand processing, resource sharing, and pay per use. There are several cloud computing issues like security, quality of service (QoS) management, data center energy consumption, and scaling. Scheduling is one of the several challenging problems in cloud computing, where several tasks need to be assigned to resources to optimize the quality of service parameters. Scheduling is a well-known NP-hard problem in cloud computing. This will require a suitable scheduling algorithm. Several heuristics and meta-heuristics algorithms were proposed for scheduling the user's task to the resources available in cloud computing in an optimal way. Hybrid scheduling algorithms have become popular in cloud computing. In this paper, we reviewed the hybrid algorithms, which are the combinations of two or more algorithms, used for scheduling in cloud computing. The basic idea behind the hybridization of the algorithm is to take useful features of the used algorithms. This article also classifies the hybrid algorithms and analyzes their objectives, quality of service (QoS) parameters, and future directions for hybrid scheduling algorithms