HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges

High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR

Allocation of Virtual Machines in Cloud Data Centers - A Survey of Problem Models and Optimization Algorithms

Data centers in public, private, and hybrid cloud settings make it possible to provision virtual machines (VMs) with unprecedented flexibility. However, purchasing, operating, and maintaining the underlying physical resources incurs significant monetary costs and also environmental impact. Therefore, cloud providers must optimize the usage of physical resources by a careful allocation of VMs to hosts, continuously balancing between the conflicting requirements on performance and operational costs. In recent years, several algorithms have been proposed for this important optimization problem. Unfortunately, the proposed approaches are hardly comparable because of subtle differences in the used problem models. This paper surveys the used problem formulations and optimization algorithms, highlighting their strengths and limitations, also pointing out the areas that need further research in the future

ASCR/HEP Exascale Requirements Review Report

This draft report summarizes and details the findings, results, and recommendations derived from the ASCR/HEP Exascale Requirements Review meeting held in June, 2015. The main conclusions are as follows. 1) Larger, more capable computing and data facilities are needed to support HEP science goals in all three frontiers: Energy, Intensity, and Cosmic. The expected scale of the demand at the 2025 timescale is at least two orders of magnitude -- and in some cases greater -- than that available currently. 2) The growth rate of data produced by simulations is overwhelming the current ability, of both facilities and researchers, to store and analyze it. Additional resources and new techniques for data analysis are urgently needed. 3) Data rates and volumes from HEP experimental facilities are also straining the ability to store and analyze large and complex data volumes. Appropriately configured leadership-class facilities can play a transformational role in enabling scientific discovery from these datasets. 4) A close integration of HPC simulation and data analysis will aid greatly in interpreting results from HEP experiments. Such an integration will minimize data movement and facilitate interdependent workflows. 5) Long-range planning between HEP and ASCR will be required to meet HEP's research needs. To best use ASCR HPC resources the experimental HEP program needs a) an established long-term plan for access to ASCR computational and data resources, b) an ability to map workflows onto HPC resources, c) the ability for ASCR facilities to accommodate workflows run by collaborations that can have thousands of individual members, d) to transition codes to the next-generation HPC platforms that will be available at ASCR facilities, e) to build up and train a workforce capable of developing and using simulations and analysis to support HEP scientific research on next-generation systems.Comment: 77 pages, 13 Figures; draft report, subject to further revisio

Climbing Up Cloud Nine: Performance Enhancement Techniques for Cloud Computing Environments

With the transformation of cloud computing technologies from an attractive trend to a business reality, the need is more pressing than ever for efficient cloud service management tools and techniques. As cloud technologies continue to mature, the service model, resource allocation methodologies, energy efficiency models and general service management schemes are not yet saturated. The burden of making this all tick perfectly falls on cloud providers. Surely, economy of scale revenues and leveraging existing infrastructure and giant workforce are there as positives, but it is far from straightforward operation from that point. Performance and service delivery will still depend on the providers’ algorithms and policies which affect all operational areas. With that in mind, this thesis tackles a set of the more critical challenges faced by cloud providers with the purpose of enhancing cloud service performance and saving on providers’ cost. This is done by exploring innovative resource allocation techniques and developing novel tools and methodologies in the context of cloud resource management, power efficiency, high availability and solution evaluation. Optimal and suboptimal solutions to the resource allocation problem in cloud data centers from both the computational and the network sides are proposed. Next, a deep dive into the energy efficiency challenge in cloud data centers is presented. Consolidation-based and non-consolidation-based solutions containing a novel dynamic virtual machine idleness prediction technique are proposed and evaluated. An investigation of the problem of simulating cloud environments follows. Available simulation solutions are comprehensively evaluated and a novel design framework for cloud simulators covering multiple variations of the problem is presented. Moreover, the challenge of evaluating cloud resource management solutions performance in terms of high availability is addressed. An extensive framework is introduced to design high availability-aware cloud simulators and a prominent cloud simulator (GreenCloud) is extended to implement it. Finally, real cloud application scenarios evaluation is demonstrated using the new tool. The primary argument made in this thesis is that the proposed resource allocation and simulation techniques can serve as basis for effective solutions that mitigate performance and cost challenges faced by cloud providers pertaining to resource utilization, energy efficiency, and client satisfaction

Cost-effective resource management for distributed computing

Current distributed computing and resource management infrastructures (e.g., Cluster and Grid) suffer from a wide variety of problems related to resource management, which include scalability bottleneck, resource allocation delay, limited quality-of-service (QoS) support, and lack of cost-aware and service level agreement (SLA) mechanisms. This thesis addresses these issues by presenting a cost-effective resource management solution which introduces the possibility of managing geographically distributed resources in resource units that are under the control of a Virtual Authority (VA). A VA is a collection of resources controlled, but not necessarily owned, by a group of users or an authority representing a group of users. It leverages the fact that different resources in disparate locations will have varying usage levels. By creating smaller divisions of resources called VAs, users would be given the opportunity to choose between a variety of cost models, and each VA could rent resources from resource providers when necessary, or could potentially rent out its own resources when underloaded. The resource management is simplified since the user and owner of a resource recognize only the VA because all permissions and charges are associated directly with the VA. The VA is controlled by a ’rental’ policy which is supported by a pool of resources that the system may rent from external resource providers. As far as scheduling is concerned, the VA is independent from competitors and can instead concentrate on managing its own resources. As a result, the VA offers scalable resource management with minimal infrastructure and operating costs. We demonstrate the feasibility of the VA through both a practical implementation of the prototype system and an illustration of its quantitative advantages through the use of extensive simulations. First, the VA concept is demonstrated through a practical implementation of the prototype system. Further, we perform a cost-benefit analysis of current distributed resource infrastructures to demonstrate the potential cost benefit of such a VA system. We then propose a costing model for evaluating the cost effectiveness of the VA approach by using an economic approach that captures revenues generated from applications and expenses incurred from renting resources. Based on our costing methodology, we present rental policies that can potentially offer effective mechanisms for running distributed and parallel applications without a heavy upfront investment and without the cost of maintaining idle resources. By using real workload trace data, we test the effectiveness of our proposed rental approaches. Finally, we propose an extension to the VA framework that promotes long-term negotiations and rentals based on service level agreements or long-term contracts. Based on the extended framework, we present new SLA-aware policies and evaluate them using real workload traces to demonstrate their effectiveness in improving rental decisions

COST-EFFICIENT RESOURCE PROVISIONING FOR CLOUD-ENABLED SCHEDULERS

Since the last decade, public cloud platforms are rapidly becoming de-facto computing platform for our society. To support the wide range of users and their diverse applications, public cloud platforms started to offer the same VMs under many purchasing options that differ across their cost, performance, availability, and time commitments. Popular purchasing options include on-demand, reserved, and transient VM types. Reserved VMs require long time commitments, whereas users can acquire and release the on-demand (and transient) VMs at any time. While transient VMs cost significantly less than on-demand VMs, platforms may revoke them at any time. In general, the stronger the commitment, i.e., longer and less flexible, the lower the price. However, longer and less flexible time commitments can increase cloud costs for users if future workloads cannot utilize the VMs they committed to buying. Interestingly, this wide range of purchasing options provide opportunities for cost savings. However, large cloud customers often find it challenging to choose the right mix of purchasing options to minimize their long-term costs while retaining the ability to adjust their capacity up and down in response to workload variations. Thus, optimizing the cloud costs requires users to select a mix of VM purchasing options based on their short- and long-term expectation of workload utilization. Notably, hybrid clouds combine multiple VM purchasing options or private clusters with public cloud VMs to optimize the cloud costs based on their workload expectations. In this thesis, we address the challenge of choosing a mix of different VM purchasing options in the context of large cloud customers and thereby optimizing their cloud costs. To this end, we make the following contributions: (i) design and implement a container orchestration platform (using Kubernetes) to optimize the cost of executing mixed interactive and batch workloads on cloud platforms using on-demand and transient VMs, (ii) develop simple analytical models for different straggler mitigation techniques to better understand the cost of synchronization in distributed machine learning workloads and compare their cost and performance on on-demand and transient VMs, (iii) design multiple policies to optimize long-term cloud costs by selecting a mix of VM purchasing options based on short- and long-term expectations of workload utilization (with no job waiting), (iv) introduce the concept of waiting policy for cloud-enabled schedulers, and show that provisioning long-term resources (e.g., reserved VMs) to optimize the cloud costs is dependent on it, and (v) design and implement speculative execution and ML-based waiting time predictions (for waiting policies) to show that optimizing job waiting in the cloud is possible without accurate job runtime predictions

Measuring the Business Value of Cloud Computing

The importance of demonstrating the value achieved from IT investments is long established in the Computer Science (CS) and Information Systems (IS) literature. However, emerging technologies such as the ever-changing complex area of cloud computing present new challenges and opportunities for demonstrating how IT investments lead to business value. Recent reviews of extant literature highlights the need for multi-disciplinary research. This research should explore and further develops the conceptualization of value in cloud computing research. In addition, there is a need for research which investigates how IT value manifests itself across the chain of service provision and in inter-organizational scenarios. This open access book will review the state of the art from an IS, Computer Science and Accounting perspective, will introduce and discuss the main techniques for measuring business value for cloud computing in a variety of scenarios, and illustrate these with mini-case studies

The Elements of Big Data Value

This open access book presents the foundations of the Big Data research and innovation ecosystem and the associated enablers that facilitate delivering value from data for business and society. It provides insights into the key elements for research and innovation, technical architectures, business models, skills, and best practices to support the creation of data-driven solutions and organizations. The book is a compilation of selected high-quality chapters covering best practices, technologies, experiences, and practical recommendations on research and innovation for big data. The contributions are grouped into four parts: · Part I: Ecosystem Elements of Big Data Value focuses on establishing the big data value ecosystem using a holistic approach to make it attractive and valuable to all stakeholders. · Part II: Research and Innovation Elements of Big Data Value details the key technical and capability challenges to be addressed for delivering big data value. · Part III: Business, Policy, and Societal Elements of Big Data Value investigates the need to make more efficient use of big data and understanding that data is an asset that has significant potential for the economy and society. · Part IV: Emerging Elements of Big Data Value explores the critical elements to maximizing the future potential of big data value. Overall, readers are provided with insights which can support them in creating data-driven solutions, organizations, and productive data ecosystems. The material represents the results of a collective effort undertaken by the European data community as part of the Big Data Value Public-Private Partnership (PPP) between the European Commission and the Big Data Value Association (BDVA) to boost data-driven digital transformation

Measuring the Business Value of Cloud Computing

The importance of demonstrating the value achieved from IT investments is long established in the Computer Science (CS) and Information Systems (IS) literature. However, emerging technologies such as the ever-changing complex area of cloud computing present new challenges and opportunities for demonstrating how IT investments lead to business value. Recent reviews of extant literature highlights the need for multi-disciplinary research. This research should explore and further develops the conceptualization of value in cloud computing research. In addition, there is a need for research which investigates how IT value manifests itself across the chain of service provision and in inter-organizational scenarios. This open access book will review the state of the art from an IS, Computer Science and Accounting perspective, will introduce and discuss the main techniques for measuring business value for cloud computing in a variety of scenarios, and illustrate these with mini-case studies