Cost-Effective Resource Allocation and Throughput Maximization in Mobile Cloudlets and Distributed Clouds

With the advance in communication networks and the use explosion of mobile devices, distributed clouds consisting of many small and medium datacenters in geographical locations and cloudlets defined as "mini" datacenters are envisioned as the next-generation cloud computing platform. In particular, distributed clouds enable disaster-resilient and scalable services by scaling the services into multiple datacenters, while cloudlets allow pervasive and continuous services with low access delay by further enabling mobile users to access the services within their proximity. To realize the promises provided by distributed clouds and mobile cloudlets, it is urgently to optimize various system performance of distributed clouds and cloudlets, such as system throughput and operational cost by developing efficient solutions. In this thesis, we aim to devise novel solutions to maximize the system throughput of mobile cloudlets, and minimize the operational costs of distributed clouds, while meeting the resource capacity constraints and users' resource demands. This however poses great challenges, that is, (1) how to maximize the system throughput of a mobile cloudlet, considering that a mobile cloudlet has limited resources to serve energy-constrained mobile devices, (2) how to efficiently and effectively manage and evaluate big data in distributed clouds, and (3) how to efficiently allocate the resources of a distributed cloud to meet the resource demands of various users. Existing studies mainly focused on implementing systems and lacked systematic optimization methods to optimize the performance of distributed clouds and mobile cloudlets. Novel techniques and approaches for performance optimization of distributed clouds and mobile cloudlets are desperately needed. To address these challenges, this thesis makes the following contributions. We firstly study online request admissions in a cloudlet with the aim of maximizing the system throughput, assuming that future user requests are not known in advance. We propose a novel admission cost model to accurately model dynamic resource consumption, and devise efficient algorithms for online request admissions. We secondly study a novel collaboration- and fairness-aware big data management problem in a distributed cloud to maximize the system throughput, while minimizing the operational cost of service providers, subject to resource capacities and users' fairness constraints, for which, we propose a novel optimization framework and devise a fast yet scalable approximation algorithm with an approximation ratio. We thirdly investigate online query evaluation for big data analysis in a distributed cloud to maximize the query acceptance ratio, while minimizing the query evaluation cost. For this problem, we propose a novel metric to model the costs of different resource consumptions in datacenters, and devise efficient online algorithms under both unsplittable and splittable source data assumptions. We fourthly address the problem of community-aware data placement of online social networks into a distributed cloud, with the aim of minimizing the operational cost of the cloud service provider, and devise a fast yet scalable algorithm for the problem, by leveraging the close community concept that considers both user read rates and update rates. We also deal with social network evolutions, by developing a dynamic evaluation algorithm for the problem. We finally evaluate the performance of all proposed algorithms in this thesis through experimental simulations, using real and/or synthetic datasets. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform existing algorithms

Computing at massive scale: Scalability and dependability challenges

Large-scale Cloud systems and big data analytics frameworks are now widely used for practical services and applications. However, with the increase of data volume, together with the heterogeneity of workloads and resources, and the dynamic nature of massive user requests, the uncertainties and complexity of resource management and service provisioning increase dramatically, often resulting in poor resource utilization, vulnerable system dependability, and user-perceived performance degradations. In this paper we report our latest understanding of the current and future challenges in this particular area, and discuss both existing and potential solutions to the problems, especially those concerned with system efficiency, scalability and dependability. We first introduce a data-driven analysis methodology for characterizing the resource and workload patterns and tracing performance bottlenecks in a massive-scale distributed computing environment. We then examine and analyze several fundamental challenges and the solutions we are developing to tackle them, including for example incremental but decentralized resource scheduling, incremental messaging communication, rapid system failover, and request handling parallelism. We integrate these solutions with our data analysis methodology in order to establish an engineering approach that facilitates the optimization, tuning and verification of massive-scale distributed systems. We aim to develop and offer innovative methods and mechanisms for future computing platforms that will provide strong support for new big data and IoE (Internet of Everything) applications