Single-Board-Computer Clusters for Cloudlet Computing in Internet of Things

The number of connected sensors and devices is expected to increase to billions in the near future. However, centralised cloud-computing data centres present various challenges to meet the requirements inherent to Internet of Things (IoT) workloads, such as low latency, high throughput and bandwidth constraints. Edge computing is becoming the standard computing paradigm for latency-sensitive real-time IoT workloads, since it addresses the aforementioned limitations related to centralised cloud-computing models. Such a paradigm relies on bringing computation close to the source of data, which presents serious operational challenges for large-scale cloud-computing providers. In this work, we present an architecture composed of low-cost Single-Board-Computer clusters near to data sources, and centralised cloud-computing data centres. The proposed cost-efficient model may be employed as an alternative to fog computing to meet real-time IoT workload requirements while keeping scalability. We include an extensive empirical analysis to assess the suitability of single-board-computer clusters as cost-effective edge-computing micro data centres. Additionally, we compare the proposed architecture with traditional cloudlet and cloud architectures, and evaluate them through extensive simulation. We finally show that acquisition costs can be drastically reduced while keeping performance levels in data-intensive IoT use cases.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2017-82113-C2-1-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad RTI2018-098062-A-I00European Union’s Horizon 2020 No. 754489Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/209

A prescriptive analytics approach for energy efficiency in datacentres.

Given the evolution of Cloud Computing in recent years, users and clients adopting Cloud Computing for both personal and business needs have increased at an unprecedented scale. This has naturally led to the increased deployments and implementations of Cloud datacentres across the globe. As a consequence of this increasing adoption of Cloud Computing, Cloud datacentres are witnessed to be massive energy consumers and environmental polluters. Whilst the energy implications of Cloud datacentres are being addressed from various research perspectives, predicting the future trend and behaviours of workloads at the datacentres thereby reducing the active server resources is one particular dimension of green computing gaining the interests of researchers and Cloud providers. However, this includes various practical and analytical challenges imposed by the increased dynamism of Cloud systems. The behavioural characteristics of Cloud workloads and users are still not perfectly clear which restrains the reliability of the prediction accuracy of existing research works in this context. To this end, this thesis presents a comprehensive descriptive analytics of Cloud workload and user behaviours, uncovering the cause and energy related implications of Cloud Computing. Furthermore, the characteristics of Cloud workloads and users including latency levels, job heterogeneity, user dynamicity, straggling task behaviours, energy implications of stragglers, job execution and termination patterns and the inherent periodicity among Cloud workload and user behaviours have been empirically presented. Driven by descriptive analytics, a novel user behaviour forecasting framework has been developed, aimed at a tri-fold forecast of user behaviours including the session duration of users, anticipated number of submissions and the arrival trend of the incoming workloads. Furthermore, a novel resource optimisation framework has been proposed to avail the most optimum level of resources for executing jobs with reduced server energy expenditures and job terminations. This optimisation framework encompasses a resource estimation module to predict the anticipated resource consumption level for the arrived jobs and a classification module to classify tasks based on their resource intensiveness. Both the proposed frameworks have been verified theoretically and tested experimentally based on Google Cloud trace logs. Experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of the achieved reliability of the forecast results and in reducing the server energy expenditures spent towards executing jobs at the datacentres.N/

Cloud computing resource scheduling and a survey of its evolutionary approaches

A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon

CyberGuarder: a virtualization security assurance architecture for green cloud computing

Cloud Computing, Green Computing, Virtualization, Virtual Security Appliance, Security Isolation

Adaptive Dispatching of Tasks in the Cloud

The increasingly wide application of Cloud Computing enables the consolidation of tens of thousands of applications in shared infrastructures. Thus, meeting the quality of service requirements of so many diverse applications in such shared resource environments has become a real challenge, especially since the characteristics and workload of applications differ widely and may change over time. This paper presents an experimental system that can exploit a variety of online quality of service aware adaptive task allocation schemes, and three such schemes are designed and compared. These are a measurement driven algorithm that uses reinforcement learning, secondly a "sensible" allocation algorithm that assigns jobs to sub-systems that are observed to provide a lower response time, and then an algorithm that splits the job arrival stream into sub-streams at rates computed from the hosts' processing capabilities. All of these schemes are compared via measurements among themselves and with a simple round-robin scheduler, on two experimental test-beds with homogeneous and heterogeneous hosts having different processing capacities.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure