Evaluation of containers as a virtualisation alternative for HEP workloads

In this paper the emerging technology of Linux containers is examined and evaluated for use in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community. Key technologies required to enable containerisation will be discussed along with emerging technologies used to manage container images. An evaluation of the requirements for containers within HEP will be made and benchmarking will be carried out to asses performance over a range of HEP workflows. The use of containers will be placed in a broader context and recommendations on future work will be given

Fog-supported delay-constrained energy-saving live migration of VMs over multiPath TCP/IP 5G connections

The incoming era of the fifth-generation fog computing-supported radio access networks (shortly, 5G FOGRANs) aims at exploiting computing/networking resource virtualization, in order to augment the limited resources of wireless devices through the seamless live migration of virtual machines (VMs) toward nearby fog data centers. For this purpose, the bandwidths of the multiple wireless network interface cards of the wireless devices may be aggregated under the control of the emerging MultiPathTCP (MPTCP) protocol. However, due to the fading and mobility-induced phenomena, the energy consumptions of the current state-of-the-art VM migration techniques may still offset their expected benefits. Motivated by these considerations, in this paper, we analytically characterize and implement in software and numerically test the optimal minimum-energy settable-complexity bandwidth manager (SCBM) for the live migration of VMs over 5G FOGRAN MPTCP connections. The key features of the proposed SCBM are that: 1) its implementation complexity is settable on-line on the basis of the target energy consumption versus implementation complexity tradeoff; 2) it minimizes the network energy consumed by the wireless device for sustaining the migration process under hard constraints on the tolerated migration times and downtimes; and 3) by leveraging a suitably designed adaptive mechanism, it is capable to quickly react to (possibly, unpredicted) fading and/or mobility-induced abrupt changes of the wireless environment without requiring forecasting. The actual effectiveness of the proposed SCBM is supported by extensive energy versus delay performance comparisons that cover: 1) a number of heterogeneous 3G/4G/WiFi FOGRAN scenarios; 2) synthetic and real-world workloads; and, 3) MPTCP and wireless connections