Characterizing Workload of Web Applications on Virtualized Servers

With the ever increasing demands of cloud computing services, planning and management of cloud resources has become a more and more important issue which directed affects the resource utilization and SLA and customer satisfaction. But before any management strategy is made, a good understanding of applications' workload in virtualized environment is the basic fact and principle to the resource management methods. Unfortunately, little work has been focused on this area. Lack of raw data could be one reason; another reason is that people still use the traditional models or methods shared under non-virtualized environment. The study of applications' workload in virtualized environment should take on some of its peculiar features comparing to the non-virtualized environment. In this paper, we are open to analyze the workload demands that reflect applications' behavior and the impact of virtualization. The results are obtained from an experimental cloud testbed running web applications, specifically the RUBiS benchmark application. We profile the workload dynamics on both virtualized and non-virtualized environments and compare the findings. The experimental results are valuable for us to estimate the performance of applications on computer architectures, to predict SLA compliance or violation based on the projected application workload and to guide the decision making to support applications with the right hardware.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, The Fourth Workshop on Big Data Benchmarks, Performance Optimization, and Emerging Hardware in conjunction with the 19th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS-2014), Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, March 1-5, 201

FixityBerry: Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation for Very Low Resourced Cultural Heritage Institutions

Whereas large cultural heritage institutions have made significant headway in providing digital preservation for archival assets—such as by setting-up geographically redundant digital repositories— medium and small institutions have struggled to meet minimum digital preservation standards. This project will explore one option for enhancing the digital preservation capacity for very low-resourced environments. FixityBerry is a project which connects consumer-grade USB hard disks to the $35 Raspberry Pi computer, which checks file fixity weekly and powers down when checking is complete. This poster will report out on an eight-month pilot of using FixityBerry to monitor the digital assets from several small cultural heritage institutions.ye