An economic and energy-aware analysis of the viability of outsourcing clustercomputing to a cloud

This paper compares the total cost of ownership of a physical cluster with the cost of a virtual cloudbased cluster. For that purpose, cost models for both a physical cluster and a cluster on a cloud have been developed. The model for the physical cluster takes into account previous works and incorporates a more detailed study of the costs related to energy consumption and the usage of energy-saving strategies. The model for the cluster on a cloud considers pricing options offered by Amazon EC2, such as reserving instances on a long-term basis, and also considers using tools for powering nodes on and off on demand, in order to avoid the costs associated to keeping idle nodes running. Using these cost models, a comparison is made of physical clusters with cloud clusters of a similar size and performance. The results show that cloud clusters are an interesting option for start-ups and other organizations with a high degree of uncertainty with respect to the computational requirements, while physical clusters are still more economically viable for organizations with a high usage rate. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The authors are grateful for the financial support received from both the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to develop project TIN2010-17804, and the Generalitat Valenciana for project GV/2012/076.Alfonso Laguna, CD.; Caballer Fernández, M.; Alvarruiz Bermejo, F.; Moltó, G. (2013). An economic and energy-aware analysis of the viability of outsourcing clustercomputing to a cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems. 29(3):704-712. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2012.08.014S70471229

Characterizing cloud federation for enhancing providers' profit

Cloud federation has been proposed as a new paradigm that allows providers to avoid the limitation of owning only a restricted amount of resources, which forces them to reject new customers when they have not enough local resources to fulfill their customers’ requirements. Federation allows a provider to dynamically outsource resources to other providers in response to demand variations. It also allows a provider that has underused resources to rent part of them to other providers. Both things could make the provider to get more profit when used adequately. This requires that the provider has a clear understanding of the potential of each federation decision, in order to choose the most convenient depending on the environment conditions. In this paper, we present a complete characterization of providers’ federation in the Cloud, including decision equations to outsource resources to other providers, rent free resources to other providers (i.e. insourcing), or shutdown unused nodes to save power, and we characterize these decisions as a function of several parameters. Then, we demonstrate in the evaluation section how a provider can enhance its profit by using these equations to exploit federation, and how the different parameters influence which is the best decision on each situation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Multi-elastic Datacenters: Auto-scaled Virtual Clusters on Energy-Aware Physical Infrastructures

[EN] Computer clusters are widely used platforms to execute different computational workloads. Indeed, the advent of virtualization and Cloud computing has paved the way to deploy virtual elastic clusters on top of Cloud infrastructures, which are typically backed by physical computing clusters. In turn, the advances in Green computing have fostered the ability to dynamically power on the nodes of physical clusters as required. Therefore, this paper introduces an open-source framework to deploy elastic virtual clusters running on elastic physical clusters where the computing capabilities of the virtual clusters are dynamically changed to satisfy both the user application's computing requirements and to minimise the amount of energy consumed by the underlying physical cluster that supports an on-premises Cloud. For that, we integrate: i) an elasticity manager both at the infrastructure level (power management) and at the virtual infrastructure level (horizontal elasticity); ii) an automatic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation agent that reduces the amount of powered on physical nodes using live migration and iii) a vertical elasticity manager to dynamically and transparently change the memory allocated to VMs, thus fostering enhanced consolidation. A case study based on real datasets executed on a production infrastructure is used to validate the proposed solution. The results show that a multi-elastic virtualized datacenter provides users with the ability to deploy customized scalable computing clusters while reducing its energy footprint.The results of this work have been partially supported by ATMOSPHERE (Adaptive, Trustworthy, Manageable, Orchestrated, Secure, Privacy-assuring Hybrid, Ecosystem for Resilient Cloud Computing), funded by the European Commission under the Cooperation Programme, Horizon 2020 grant agreement No 777154.Alfonso Laguna, CD.; Caballer Fernández, M.; Calatrava Arroyo, A.; Moltó, G.; Blanquer Espert, I. (2018). Multi-elastic Datacenters: Auto-scaled Virtual Clusters on Energy-Aware Physical Infrastructures. Journal of Grid Computing. 17(1):191-204. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-018-9449-zS191204171Buyya, R.: High Performance Cluster Computing: Architectures and Systems. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River (1999)de Alfonso, C., Caballer, M., Alvarruiz, F., Moltó, G.: An economic and energy-aware analysis of the viability of outsourcing cluster computing to the cloud. Futur. Gener. Comput. Syst. (Int. J. Grid Comput eScience) 29, 704–712 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2012.08.014Williams, D., Jamjoom, H., Liu, Y.H., Weatherspoon, H.: Overdriver: handling memory overload in an oversubscribed cloud. ACM SIGPLAN Not. 46(7), 205 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1145/2007477.1952709 . http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2007477.1952709Valentini, G., Lassonde, W., Khan, S., Min-Allah, N., Madani, S., Li, J., Zhang, L., Wang, L., Ghani, N., Kolodziej, J., Li, H., Zomaya, A., Xu, C.Z., Balaji, P., Vishnu, A., Pinel, F., Pecero, J., Kliazovich, D., Bouvry, P.: An overview of energy efficiency techniques in cluster computing systems. Clust. Comput. 16(1), 3–15 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-011-0171-xDe Alfonso, C., Caballer, M., Hernández, V.: Efficient power management in high performance computer clusters. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Multi-conference on Innovative Developments in ICT, Proceedings of the International Conference on Green Computing 2010 (ICGreen 2010), 39–44 (2010)OpenNebula: OpenNebula Cloud Software https://opennebula.org/ . [Online; accessed 12-June-2017]OpenStack: OpenStack Cloud Software. http://openstack.org . [Online; accessed 12 June 2017]VMWare: VMWare vCenter Server. https://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-server.html . [Online; accessed 12 June 2017]De Alfonso, C., Blanquer, I.: Automatic consolidation of virtual machines in on-premises cloud platforms. In: IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, pp 1070–1079 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/CCGRID.2017.128Chase, J.S., Irwin, D.E., Grit, L.E., Moore, J.D., Sprenkle, S.E.: Dynamic virtual clusters in a grid site manager. In: Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, HPDC ’03, p 90. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2003). http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=822087.823392Doelitzscher, F., Held, M., Reich, C., Sulistio, A.: Viteraas: Virtual cluster as a service. In: 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), pp 652–657 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/CloudCom.2011.101Wei, X., Wang, H., Li, H., Zou, L.: Dynamic deployment and management of elastic virtual clusters. In: 2011 Sixth Annual Chinagrid Conference (ChinaGrid), pp 35–41 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/ChinaGrid.2011.31de Assuncao, M.D., di Costanzo, A., Buyya, R.: Evaluating the cost-benefit of using cloud computing to extend the capacity of clusters. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, HPDC ’09, pp 141–150. ACM, New York (2009). https://doi.org/10.1145/1551609.1551635 . http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1551609.1551635Marshall, P., Keahey, K., Freeman, T.: Elastic site: Using clouds to elastically extend site resources. In: 2010 10th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid), pp 43–52 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1109/CCGRID.2010.80Niu, S., Zhai, J., Ma, X., Tang, X., Chen, W.: Cost-effective cloud hpc resource provisioning by building semi-elastic virtual clusters. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC ’13, pp 56:1–56:12. ACM, New York (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2503210.2503236 . http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2503210.2503236Bialecki, A., Cafarella, M., Cutting, D., Omalley, O.: Hadoop: a framework for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware. Tech. rep. Apache Hadoop. http://hadoop.apache.org (2005)MIT: StarCluster Elastic Load Balancer. http://web.mit.edu/stardev/cluster/docs/0.92rc2/manual/load_balancer.htmlAppliance, C.C.S.: Creating elastic virtual clusters. http://cernvm.cern.ch/portal/elasticclusters (2015)Research project, T.G.: The games research project. http://www.green-datacenters.eu (2013)Cioara, T., Anghel, I., Salomie, I., Copil, G., Moldovan, D., Kipp, A.: Energy aware dynamic resource consolidation algorithm for virtualized service centers based on reinforcement learning. In: 2011 10th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (ISPDC), pp 163–169 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/ISPDC.2011.32Farahnakian, F., Liljeberg, P., Plosila, J.: Energy-efficient virtual machines consolidation in cloud data centers using reinforcement learning. In: 2014 22nd Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP), pp 500–507 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1109/PDP.2014.109Masoumzadeh, S., Hlavacs, H.: Integrating vm selection criteria in distributed dynamic vm consolidation using fuzzy q-learning. In: 2013 9th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM), pp 332–338 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1109/CNSM.2013.6727854Feller, E., Rilling, L., Morin, C.: Energy-aware ant colony based workload placement in clouds. In: 2011 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (GRID), pp 26–33 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/Grid.2011.13Pop, C.B., Anghel, I., Cioara, T., Salomie, I., Vartic, I.: A swarm-inspired data center consolidation methodology. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics, WIMS ’12, pp 41:1–41:7. ACM, New York (2012). https://doi.org/10.1145/2254129.2254180Marzolla, M., Babaoglu, O., Panzieri, F.: Server consolidation in clouds through gossiping. In: Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks, WOWMOM ’11, pp 1–6. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/WoWMoM.2011.5986483Ghafari, S., Fazeli, M., Patooghy, A., Rikhtechi, L.: Bee-mmt: A load balancing method for power consumption management in cloud computing. In: 2013 Sixth International Conference on Contemporary Computing (IC3), pp 76–80 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1109/IC3.2013.6612165Ajiro, Y., Tanaka, A.: Improving packing algorithms for server consolidation. In: International CMG Conference, pp. 399–406. Computer Measurement Group (2007)Verma, A., Ahuja, P., Neogi, A.: pmapper: power and migration cost aware application placement in virtualized systems. In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Conference on Middleware, Middleware ’08, pp 243–264. Springer, New York (2008)Beloglazov, A., Abawajy, J., Buyya, R.: Energy-aware resource allocation heuristics for efficient management of data centers for cloud computing. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 28 (5), 755–768 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2011.04.017Guazzone, M., Anglano, C., Canonico, M.: Exploiting vm migration for the automated power and performance management of green cloud computing systems. 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Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS

This case study illustrates the potential benefits and risks associated with the migration of an IT system in the oil & gas industry from an in-house data center to Amazon EC2 from a broad variety of stakeholder perspectives across the enterprise, thus transcending the typical, yet narrow, financial and technical analysis offered by providers. Our results show that the system infrastructure in the case study would have cost 37% less over 5 years on EC2, and using cloud computing could have potentially eliminated 21% of the support calls for this system. These findings seem significant enough to call for a migration of the system to the cloud but our stakeholder impact analysis revealed that there are significant risks associated with this. Whilst the benefits of using the cloud are attractive, we argue that it is important that enterprise decision-makers consider the overall organizational implications of the changes brought about with cloud computing to avoid implementing local optimizations at the cost of organization-wide performance.Comment: Submitted to IEEE CLOUD 201

Efficient and elastic management of computing infrastructures

Tesis por compendio[EN] Modern data centers integrate a lot of computer and electronic devices. However, some reports state that the mean usage of a typical data center is around 50% of its peak capacity, and the mean usage of each server is between 10% and 50%. A lot of energy is destined to power on computer hardware that most of the time remains idle. Therefore, it would be possible to save energy simply by powering off those parts from the data center that are not actually used, and powering them on again as they are needed. Most data centers have computing clusters that are used for intensive computing, recently evolving towards an on-premises Cloud service model. Despite the use of low consuming components, higher energy savings can be achieved by dynamically adapting the system to the actual workload. The main approach in this case is the usage of energy saving criteria for scheduling the jobs or the virtual machines into the working nodes. The aim is to power off idle servers automatically. But it is necessary to schedule the power management of the servers in order to minimize the impact on the end users and their applications. The objective of this thesis is the elastic and efficient management of cluster infrastructures, with the aim of reducing the costs associated to idle components. This objective is addressed by automating the power management of the working nodes in a computing cluster, and also proactive stimulating the load distribution to achieve idle resources that could be powered off by means of memory overcommitment and live migration of virtual machines. Moreover, this automation is of interest for virtual clusters, as they also suffer from the same problems. While in physical clusters idle working nodes waste energy, in the case of virtual clusters that are built from virtual machines, the idle working nodes can waste money in commercial Clouds or computational resources in an on-premises Cloud.[ES] En los Centros de Procesos de Datos (CPD) existe una gran concentración de dispositivos informáticos y de equipamiento electrónico. Sin embargo, algunos estudios han mostrado que la utilización media de los CPD está en torno al 50%, y que la utilización media de los servidores se encuentra entre el 10% y el 50%. Estos datos evidencian que existe una gran cantidad de energía destinada a alimentar equipamiento ocioso, y que podríamos conseguir un ahorro energético simplemente apagando los componentes que no se estén utilizando. En muchos CPD suele haber clusters de computadores que se utilizan para computación de altas prestaciones y para la creación de Clouds privados. Si bien se ha tratado de ahorrar energía utilizando componentes de bajo consumo, también es posible conseguirlo adaptando los sistemas a la carga de trabajo en cada momento. En los últimos años han surgido trabajos que investigan la aplicación de criterios energéticos a la hora de seleccionar en qué servidor, de entre los que forman un cluster, se debe ejecutar un trabajo o alojar una máquina virtual. En muchos casos se trata de conseguir equipos ociosos que puedan ser apagados, pero habitualmente se asume que dicho apagado se hace de forma automática, y que los equipos se encienden de nuevo cuando son necesarios. Sin embargo, es necesario hacer una planificación de encendido y apagado de máquinas para minimizar el impacto en el usuario final. En esta tesis nos planteamos la gestión elástica y eficiente de infrastructuras de cálculo tipo cluster, con el objetivo de reducir los costes asociados a los componentes ociosos. Para abordar este problema nos planteamos la automatización del encendido y apagado de máquinas en los clusters, así como la aplicación de técnicas de migración en vivo y de sobreaprovisionamiento de memoria para estimular la obtención de equipos ociosos que puedan ser apagados. Además, esta automatización es de interés para los clusters virtuales, puesto que también sufren el problema de los componentes ociosos, sólo que en este caso están compuestos por, en lugar de equipos físicos que gastan energía, por máquinas virtuales que gastan dinero en un proveedor Cloud comercial o recursos en un Cloud privado.[CA] En els Centres de Processament de Dades (CPD) hi ha una gran concentració de dispositius informàtics i d'equipament electrònic. No obstant això, alguns estudis han mostrat que la utilització mitjana dels CPD està entorn del 50%, i que la utilització mitjana dels servidors es troba entre el 10% i el 50%. Estes dades evidencien que hi ha una gran quantitat d'energia destinada a alimentar equipament ociós, i que podríem aconseguir un estalvi energètic simplement apagant els components que no s'estiguen utilitzant. En molts CPD sol haver-hi clusters de computadors que s'utilitzen per a computació d'altes prestacions i per a la creació de Clouds privats. Si bé s'ha tractat d'estalviar energia utilitzant components de baix consum, també és possible aconseguir-ho adaptant els sistemes a la càrrega de treball en cada moment. En els últims anys han sorgit treballs que investiguen l'aplicació de criteris energètics a l'hora de seleccionar en quin servidor, d'entre els que formen un cluster, s'ha d'executar un treball o allotjar una màquina virtual. En molts casos es tracta d'aconseguir equips ociosos que puguen ser apagats, però habitualment s'assumix que l'apagat es fa de forma automàtica, i que els equips s'encenen novament quan són necessaris. No obstant això, és necessari fer una planificació d'encesa i apagat de màquines per a minimitzar l'impacte en l'usuari final. En esta tesi ens plantegem la gestió elàstica i eficient d'infrastructuras de càlcul tipus cluster, amb l'objectiu de reduir els costos associats als components ociosos. Per a abordar este problema ens plantegem l'automatització de l'encesa i apagat de màquines en els clusters, així com l'aplicació de tècniques de migració en viu i de sobreaprovisionament de memòria per a estimular l'obtenció d'equips ociosos que puguen ser apagats. A més, esta automatització és d'interés per als clusters virtuals, ja que també patixen el problema dels components ociosos, encara que en este cas estan compostos per, en compte d'equips físics que gasten energia, per màquines virtuals que gasten diners en un proveïdor Cloud comercial o recursos en un Cloud privat.Alfonso Laguna, CD. (2015). Efficient and elastic management of computing infrastructures [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/57187Compendi

A Secure Cloud-Based SCADA Application: the Use Case of a Water Supply Network

Cloud computing paradigm is gaining more and more momentum, to the extent that it is no more confined to its initial application domains, i.e. use by enterprises and businesses willing to lower costs or to increase computing capacity in a flexible manner. In particular, increasing interest is recently being paid to the huge potentials - in terms of benefits for the society at large - that might result from the adoption of cloud computing technology by critical infrastructure (CI) operators. This is of course putting special emphasis on the need for dependable and trustworthy security mechanisms in cloud technology based services, since a critical infrastructure is vital for essential functioning of a country. Incidental or deliberate damages to a CI have serious impacts on the economy, and possibly make essential services unavailable to the communities it serves. In this paper we present the proof-of concept of a cloud-based Water Supply Network Monitoring (WSNM) application, named RiskBuster (RB), that ensures the confidentiality and integrity of SCADA monitoring data collected from dam sensors and stored in the cloud by using the innovative Intel Software Guard eXtension (SGX) technology

An evaluation of information and communication technology application in South African construction industry

Abstract: The construction industry is evolving like other allied industries. New innovations are borne out of the quest to achieve more value for money, while also retaining a competitive edge in the international sphere. A comprehensive study on the application of information and communication technology (ICT) for construction work in South Africa, particularly the stages of construction work, is lacking. This study seeks to evalaute information and communication technology tools used for construction activities in the South Africa construction industry. The research evaluates the level of awareness of construction professionals as to the use of new ICT tools in the fourth industrial revolution era. It also discusses the ICT tools used at the planning stage of construction, the design and the construction stage. It employed the Professional Client/Consultants Service Agreement Committee (PROCSA) template but limited it to stage 0 to 5. It also discusses the challenges, drivers and benefits of using ICT tools for construction activities in South Africa. The primary data was collected through a questionnaire which was distributed online via Questionpro platform to South African construction professionals in Gauteng Province only. One hundred and fifty (150) questionnaires were distributed. One hundred and twenty (120) of the responses were valid and used for the analysis. This accounted for eighty per cent (80%) of the total survey. In ensuring the reliability of the research questionnaire, Cronbach's alpha coefficient reliability was conducted on the scaled research questions. Compare mean was used to address the level of awareness of ICT tools and ICT tools used at the planning, design, and construction stages. Factor analysis was used to analyze the factors which serve as challenges to, drivers of, and benefits of the effective use of ICT tools. The study revealed that professionals have different awareness levels of ICT tools. They are more aware of ICT tools that are the core of their professional duties. At the planning stage of construction work in South Africa, all professionals use design/estimation and simulation-based tool most. In the design stage, the most frequently used tools are the computer-based tools and the design/estimation-based tools which are used by engineers, architects, and construction project managers. At the construction stage, computer-based tools and administrative tools are the highest-ranked tools. The exploratory factor analysis revealed that the challenges to the use of ICT in the South African construction industry are classified into people, cost, standardization, and management-related problems. The measures to ensure the effective use of ICT tools for construction processes in South Africa are also grouped into user-related factors, ICT knowledge and end-uses. The benefits from the effective use of ICT tools for construction...M.Tech. (Construction Management

A Review of the Current Level of Support to Aid Decisions for Migrating to Cloud Computing

© 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Cloud computing provides an innovative delivery model that enables enterprises to reduce operational costs and improve flexibility and scalability. Organisations wishing to migrate their legacy systems to the cloud often need to go through a difficult and complicated decision-making process. This can be due to multiple factors including restructuring IT resources, the still evolving nature of the cloud environment, and the continuous expansion of the services offered. These have increased the requirement for tools and techniques to help the decision-making process for migration. Although significant contributions have been made in this area, there are still many aspects which require further support. This paper evaluates the existing level of support to aid the decision-making process. It examines the complexity of decisions, evaluates the current state of Decision Support Systems in respect of migrating to the cloud, and analyses three models that proposed support for the migration processes. This paper identifies the need for a coherent approach for supporting the whole decision-making process. Further, it explores possible new approaches for addressing the complex issues involved in decision-making for migrating to the cloud

Reference Framework and Research Agenda

Cloud Computing is a topic that has gained momentum in the last years. Current studies show that an increasing number of companies is evaluating the promised advantages and considering making use of cloud services. In this paper we investigate the phenomenon of cloud computing and its importance for the operation of ERP systems. We argue that the phenomenon of cloud computing could lead to a decisive change in the way business software is deployed in companies. Our reference framework contains three levels (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and clarifies the meaning of public, private and hybrid clouds. The three levels of cloud computing and their impact on ERP systems operation are discussed. From the literature we identify areas for future research and propose a research agenda