An Automatic Decision-Making Mechanism for Virtual Machine Live Migration in Private Clouds

Due to the increasing number of computer hosts deployed in an enterprise, automatic management of electronic applications is inevitable. To provide diverse services, there will be increases in procurement, maintenance, and electricity costs. Virtualization technology is getting popular in cloud computing environment, which enables the efficient use of computing resources and reduces the operating cost. In this paper, we present an automatic mechanism to consolidate virtual servers and shut down the idle physical machines during the off-peak hours, while activating more machines at peak times. Through the monitoring of system resources, heavy system loads can be evenly distributed over physical machines to achieve load balancing. By integrating the feature of load balancing with virtual machine live migration, we successfully develop an automatic private cloud management system. Experimental results demonstrate that, during the off-peak hours, we can save power consumption of about 69 W by consolidating the idle virtual servers. And the load balancing implementation has shown that two machines with 80% and 40% CPU loads can be uniformly balanced to 60% each. And, through the use of preallocated virtual machine images, the proposed mechanism can be easily applied to a large amount of physical machines

Automated Greenhouse Watering and Heating System for the Schenectady ARC

Everyone wants to feel useful and to be able to contribute to their community. The Schenectady ARC aims to provide people with developmental disabilities the resources, services, and support that enable them to advocate and participate within their communities. The program seeks to encourage these people to develop skills and hobbies that give them independence and purpose. One way is operating the ARC\u27s greenhouse. Individuals at the Maple Ridge Center are responsible for operating the water system to irrigate the plant growing tables, daily, and ensuring that the proper amount of water is distributed to the plants. This is a rewarding activity and offers them the opportunity to develop useful skills in greenhouse management and maintenance. However, despite offering manual and automatic options, the current equipment of the greenhouse is not user-friendly and vulnerable if water leaks. The objective of our project is to communicate with the Schenectady ARC to develop an automatic controller for heating and water delivery that will be easy to use, safe, robust, affordable and easy to maintain. This project was started by Guo Qianyue CPE class of 2016, kept on by Stengel Kyle CPE class of 2018, continued by Lisa Gu CPE class of 2019, and followed by Larissa Umulinga CPE class of 2020. The system we created is a wireless sensor system that reads and transmits the moisture and temperature data wirelessly to control the watering and heating system at the ARC greenhouse. This paper describes the problem, goals, design specifications, testing plan, standards and ethics for this project

Automatic memory-based vertical elasticity and oversubscription on cloud platforms

Hypervisors and Operating Systems support vertical elasticity techniques such as memory ballooning to dynamically assign the memory of Virtual Machines (VMs). However, current Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs), such as OpenNebula or OpenStack, do not currently support dynamic vertical elasticity. This paper describes a system that integrates with the CMP to provide automatic vertical elasticity to adapt the memory size of the VMs to their current memory consumption, featuring live migration to prevent overload scenarios, without downtime for the VMs. This enables an enhanced VM-per-host consolidation ratio while maintaining the Quality of Service for VMs, since their memory is dynamically increased as necessary. The feasibility of the development is assessed via two case studies based on OpenNebula featuring (i) horizontal and vertical elastic virtual clusters on a production Grid infrastructure and (ii) elastic multi-tenant VMs that run Docker containers coupled with live migration techniques. The results show that memory oversubscription can be integrated on CMPs to deliver automatic memory management without severely impacting the performance of the VMs. This results in a memory management framework for on-premises Clouds that features live migration to safely enable transient oversubscription of physical resources in a CMP. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The authors would like to thank the Spanish "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" for the project CLUVIEM (TIN2013-44390-R) and the European Commission for the project INDIGO-DataCloud with grant number 653549.Moltó, G.; Caballer Fernández, M.; Alfonso Laguna, CD. (2016). Automatic memory-based vertical elasticity and oversubscription on cloud platforms. Future Generation Computer Systems. 56:1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2015.10.002S1105

Research and Development Workstation Environment: the new class of Current Research Information Systems

Against the backdrop of the development of modern technologies in the field of scientific research the new class of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and related intelligent information technologies has arisen. It was called - Research and Development Workstation Environment (RDWE) - the comprehensive problem-oriented information systems for scientific research and development lifecycle support. The given paper describes design and development fundamentals of the RDWE class systems. The RDWE class system's generalized information model is represented in the article as a three-tuple composite web service that include: a set of atomic web services, each of them can be designed and developed as a microservice or a desktop application, that allows them to be used as an independent software separately; a set of functions, the functional filling-up of the Research and Development Workstation Environment; a subset of atomic web services that are required to implement function of composite web service. In accordance with the fundamental information model of the RDWE class the system for supporting research in the field of ontology engineering - the automated building of applied ontology in an arbitrary domain area, scientific and technical creativity - the automated preparation of application documents for patenting inventions in Ukraine was developed. It was called - Personal Research Information System. A distinctive feature of such systems is the possibility of their problematic orientation to various types of scientific activities by combining on a variety of functional services and adding new ones within the cloud integrated environment. The main results of our work are focused on enhancing the effectiveness of the scientist's research and development lifecycle in the arbitrary domain area.Comment: In English, 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, added references in Russian. Published. Prepared for special issue (UkrPROG 2018 conference) of the scientific journal "Problems of programming" (Founder: National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Institute of Software Systems of NAS Ukraine

Deliverable JRA1.1: Evaluation of current network control and management planes for multi-domain network infrastructure

This deliverable includes a compilation and evaluation of available control and management architectures and protocols applicable to a multilayer infrastructure in a multi-domain Virtual Network environment.The scope of this deliverable is mainly focused on the virtualisation of the resources within a network and at processing nodes. The virtualization of the FEDERICA infrastructure allows the provisioning of its available resources to users by means of FEDERICA slices. A slice is seen by the user as a real physical network under his/her domain, however it maps to a logical partition (a virtual instance) of the physical FEDERICA resources. A slice is built to exhibit to the highest degree all the principles applicable to a physical network (isolation, reproducibility, manageability, ...). Currently, there are no standard definitions available for network virtualization or its associated architectures. Therefore, this deliverable proposes the Virtual Network layer architecture and evaluates a set of Management- and Control Planes that can be used for the partitioning and virtualization of the FEDERICA network resources. This evaluation has been performed taking into account an initial set of FEDERICA requirements; a possible extension of the selected tools will be evaluated in future deliverables. The studies described in this deliverable define the virtual architecture of the FEDERICA infrastructure. During this activity, the need has been recognised to establish a new set of basic definitions (taxonomy) for the building blocks that compose the so-called slice, i.e. the virtual network instantiation (which is virtual with regard to the abstracted view made of the building blocks of the FEDERICA infrastructure) and its architectural plane representation. These definitions will be established as a common nomenclature for the FEDERICA project. Other important aspects when defining a new architecture are the user requirements. It is crucial that the resulting architecture fits the demands that users may have. Since this deliverable has been produced at the same time as the contact process with users, made by the project activities related to the Use Case definitions, JRA1 has proposed a set of basic Use Cases to be considered as starting point for its internal studies. When researchers want to experiment with their developments, they need not only network resources on their slices, but also a slice of the processing resources. These processing slice resources are understood as virtual machine instances that users can use to make them behave as software routers or end nodes, on which to download the software protocols or applications they have produced and want to assess in a realistic environment. Hence, this deliverable also studies the APIs of several virtual machine management software products in order to identify which best suits FEDERICA’s needs.Postprint (published version

Proposing an Appropriate Soil Water Content Estimation Technique for Iran

Limitation of water resources is one of the major factors in the agricultural development of Iran. In recent years. Iran suffers from increases water consumption and drought conditions, This is why efficient water management in agriculture production becomes an inevitable requirement. One of the main aspects of water management in agriculture production is operating any type of irrigation system efficiently. A good on-farm irrigation water management requires a routine monitoring of soil water content (SWC). Recently a substantial number of different experimental methods in categories of direct, indirect, ground based and remote sensing have been developed to determine the SWC, and a large body of knowledge is now available on theory and applications. The need for indirect ground-based automatic methods for obtaining water content or indices of water content is evident when the time and labor involved in direct sampling is considered. In view of Iran conditions, selecting the best soil water measurement technology for the optimal management of irrigation system is a challenge for managers and the decision makers. This research aims to (i) compile the available ground based SWC measurement methods and discuses along with their advantages and their limitations, (ii) propose a technique that will be most useful for Iran condition. Considering regional parameters of Iran, these researchers found tensiometers as a proper technique for good water management. This technique with lower price in addition with other advantages could be more effective in development of Iran Agricultural Mechanization

Transit Performance Measures in California

This research is the result of a California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) request to assess the most commonly available transit performance measures in California. Caltrans wanted to understand performance measures and data used by Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and transit agencies to help it develop statewide measures. This report serves as a summary reference guide to help Caltrans understand the numerous and diverse performance measures used by MPOs and transit agencies in California. First, investigators review the available literature to identify a complete transit performance framework for the purposes of organizing agency measures, metrics, and data sources. Next, they review the latest transit performance measures documented in planning reports for the four largest MPOs in California (San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Sacramento). Researchers pay special attention to the transit performance measures used by these MPOs, because these measures are available for the majority of California’s population. Finally, investigators summarize 231 performance measures used by a total 26 local transit agencies in the State of California, based on transit planning documents available on the internet