Budget Constrained Execution of Multiple Bag-of-Tasks Applications on the Cloud

Optimising the execution of Bag-of-Tasks (BoT) applications on the cloud is a hard problem due to the trade- offs between performance and monetary cost. The problem can be further complicated when multiple BoT applications need to be executed. In this paper, we propose and implement a heuristic algorithm that schedules tasks of multiple applications onto different cloud virtual machines in order to maximise performance while satisfying a given budget constraint. Current approaches are limited in task scheduling since they place a limit on the number of cloud resources that can be employed by the applications. However, in the proposed algorithm there are no such limits, and in comparison with other approaches, the algorithm on average achieves an improved performance of 10%. The experimental results also highlight that the algorithm yields consistent performance even with low budget constraints which cannot be achieved by competing approaches.Comment: 8th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2015

Deployment and management of SDR cloud computing resources: problem definition and fundamental limits

Software-defined radio (SDR) describes radio transceivers implemented in software that executes on general-purpose hardware. SDR combined with cloud computing technology will reshape the wireless access infrastructure, enabling computing resource sharing and centralized digital-signal processing (DSP). SDR clouds have different constraints than general-purpose grids or clouds: real-time response to user session requests and real-time execution of the corresponding DSP chains. This article addresses the SDR cloud computing resource management problem. We show that the maximum traffic load that a single resource allocator (RA) can handle is limited. It is a function of the RA complexity and the call setup delay and user blocking probability constraints. We derive the RA capacity analytically and provide numerical examples. The analysis demonstrates the fundamental tradeoffs between short call setup delays (few processors) and low blocking probability (many processors). The simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of a distributed resource management and the necessity of adapting the processor assignment to RAs according to the given traffic load distribution. These results provide new insights and guidelines for designing data centers and distributed resource management methods for SDR clouds.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Technical Report: A Trace-Based Performance Study of Autoscaling Workloads of Workflows in Datacenters

To improve customer experience, datacenter operators offer support for simplifying application and resource management. For example, running workloads of workflows on behalf of customers is desirable, but requires increasingly more sophisticated autoscaling policies, that is, policies that dynamically provision resources for the customer. Although selecting and tuning autoscaling policies is a challenging task for datacenter operators, so far relatively few studies investigate the performance of autoscaling for workloads of workflows. Complementing previous knowledge, in this work we propose the first comprehensive performance study in the field. Using trace-based simulation, we compare state-of-the-art autoscaling policies across multiple application domains, workload arrival patterns (e.g., burstiness), and system utilization levels. We further investigate the interplay between autoscaling and regular allocation policies, and the complexity cost of autoscaling. Our quantitative study focuses not only on traditional performance metrics and on state-of-the-art elasticity metrics, but also on time- and memory-related autoscaling-complexity metrics. Our main results give strong and quantitative evidence about previously unreported operational behavior, for example, that autoscaling policies perform differently across application domains and by how much they differ.Comment: Technical Report for the CCGrid 2018 submission "A Trace-Based Performance Study of Autoscaling Workloads of Workflows in Datacenters

Algorithms for optimising heterogeneous Cloud virtual machine clusters

This research was supported by an Amazon Web Services Education Research grant.It is challenging to execute an application in a heterogeneous cloud cluster, which consists of multiple types of virtual machines with different performance capabilities and prices. This paper aims to mitigate this challenge by proposing a scheduling mechanism to optimise the execution of Bag-of-Task jobs on a heterogeneous cloud cluster. The proposed scheduler considers two approaches to select suitable cloud resources for executing a user application while satisfying pre-defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs) both in terms of execution deadline and minimising monetary cost. Additionally, a mechanism for dynamic re-assignment of jobs during execution is presented to resolve potential violation of SLOs. Experimental studies are performed both in simulation and on a public cloud using real-world applications. The results highlight that our scheduling approaches result in cost saving of up to 31% in comparison to naive approaches that only employ a single type of virtual machine in a homogeneous cluster. Dynamic reassignment completely prevents deadline violation in the best-case and reduces deadline violations by 95% in the worst-case scenario.Postprin

Resource allocation model for grid computing environment

Grid computing is a collection of heterogeneous resources that is highly dynamic and unpredictable. It is typically used for solving scientific or technical problems that require a large number of computer processing cycles or access to substantial amounts of data. Various resource allocation strategies have been used to make resource use more productive, with subsequent distributed environmental performance increases. The user sends a job by providing a predetermined time limit for running that job. Then, the scheduler gives priority to work according to the request and scheduling policy and places it in the waiting queue. When the resource is released, the scheduler selects the job from the waiting queue with a specific algorithm. Requests will be rejected if the required resources are not available. The user can re-submit a new request by modifying the parameter until available resources can be found. Eventually, there is a decrease in idle resources between work and resource utilization, and the waiting time will increase. An effective scheduling policy is required to improve resource use and reduce waiting times. In this paper, the FCFS-LRH method is proposed, where jobs received will be sorted by arrival time, execution time, and the number of resources needed. After the sorting process, the work will be placed in a logical view, and the job will be sent to the actual resource when it executes. The experimental results show that the proposed model can increase resource utilization by 1.34% and reduce waiting time by 20.47% when compared to existing approaches. This finding could be beneficially implemented in cloud systems resource allocation management

Hybrid ant colony system algorithm for static and dynamic job scheduling in grid computing

Grid computing is a distributed system with heterogeneous infrastructures. Resource management system (RMS) is one of the most important components which has great influence on the grid computing performance. The main part of RMS is the scheduler algorithm which has the responsibility to map submitted tasks to available resources. The complexity of scheduling problem is considered as a nondeterministic polynomial complete (NP-complete) problem and therefore, an intelligent algorithm is required to achieve better scheduling solution. One of the prominent intelligent algorithms is ant colony system (ACS) which is implemented widely to solve various types of scheduling problems. However, ACS suffers from stagnation problem in medium and large size grid computing system. ACS is based on exploitation and exploration mechanisms where the exploitation is sufficient but the exploration has a deficiency. The exploration in ACS is based on a random approach without any strategy. This study proposed four hybrid algorithms between ACS, Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Tabu Search (TS) algorithms to enhance the ACS performance. The algorithms are ACS(GA), ACS+GA, ACS(TS), and ACS+TS. These proposed hybrid algorithms will enhance ACS in terms of exploration mechanism and solution refinement by implementing low and high levels hybridization of ACS, GA, and TS algorithms. The proposed algorithms were evaluated against twelve metaheuristic algorithms in static (expected time to compute model) and dynamic (distribution pattern) grid computing environments. A simulator called ExSim was developed to mimic the static and dynamic nature of the grid computing. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms outperform ACS in terms of best makespan values. Performance of ACS(GA), ACS+GA, ACS(TS), and ACS+TS are better than ACS by 0.35%, 2.03%, 4.65% and 6.99% respectively for static environment. For dynamic environment, performance of ACS(GA), ACS+GA, ACS+TS, and ACS(TS) are better than ACS by 0.01%, 0.56%, 1.16%, and 1.26% respectively. The proposed algorithms can be used to schedule tasks in grid computing with better performance in terms of makespan