EPOBF: Energy Efficient Allocation of Virtual Machines in High Performance Computing Cloud

Cloud computing has become more popular in provision of computing resources under virtual machine (VM) abstraction for high performance computing (HPC) users to run their applications. A HPC cloud is such cloud computing environment. One of challenges of energy efficient resource allocation for VMs in HPC cloud is tradeoff between minimizing total energy consumption of physical machines (PMs) and satisfying Quality of Service (e.g. performance). On one hand, cloud providers want to maximize their profit by reducing the power cost (e.g. using the smallest number of running PMs). On the other hand, cloud customers (users) want highest performance for their applications. In this paper, we focus on the scenario that scheduler does not know global information about user jobs and user applications in the future. Users will request shortterm resources at fixed start times and non interrupted durations. We then propose a new allocation heuristic (named Energy-aware and Performance per watt oriented Bestfit (EPOBF)) that uses metric of performance per watt to choose which most energy-efficient PM for mapping each VM (e.g. maximum of MIPS per Watt). Using information from Feitelson's Parallel Workload Archive to model HPC jobs, we compare the proposed EPOBF to state of the art heuristics on heterogeneous PMs (each PM has multicore CPU). Simulations show that the EPOBF can reduce significant total energy consumption in comparison with state of the art allocation heuristics.Comment: 10 pages, in Procedings of International Conference on Advanced Computing and Applications, Journal of Science and Technology, Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology, ISSN 0866-708X, Vol. 51, No. 4B, 201

A Survey of Prediction and Classification Techniques in Multicore Processor Systems

In multicore processor systems, being able to accurately predict the future provides new optimization opportunities, which otherwise could not be exploited. For example, an oracle able to predict a certain application\u27s behavior running on a smart phone could direct the power manager to switch to appropriate dynamic voltage and frequency scaling modes that would guarantee minimum levels of desired performance while saving energy consumption and thereby prolonging battery life. Using predictions enables systems to become proactive rather than continue to operate in a reactive manner. This prediction-based proactive approach has become increasingly popular in the design and optimization of integrated circuits and of multicore processor systems. Prediction transforms from simple forecasting to sophisticated machine learning based prediction and classification that learns from existing data, employs data mining, and predicts future behavior. This can be exploited by novel optimization techniques that can span across all layers of the computing stack. In this survey paper, we present a discussion of the most popular techniques on prediction and classification in the general context of computing systems with emphasis on multicore processors. The paper is far from comprehensive, but, it will help the reader interested in employing prediction in optimization of multicore processor systems

Power Management Techniques for Data Centers: A Survey

With growing use of internet and exponential growth in amount of data to be stored and processed (known as 'big data'), the size of data centers has greatly increased. This, however, has resulted in significant increase in the power consumption of the data centers. For this reason, managing power consumption of data centers has become essential. In this paper, we highlight the need of achieving energy efficiency in data centers and survey several recent architectural techniques designed for power management of data centers. We also present a classification of these techniques based on their characteristics. This paper aims to provide insights into the techniques for improving energy efficiency of data centers and encourage the designers to invent novel solutions for managing the large power dissipation of data centers.Comment: Keywords: Data Centers, Power Management, Low-power Design, Energy Efficiency, Green Computing, DVFS, Server Consolidatio

Toward sustainable data centers: a comprehensive energy management strategy

Data centers are major contributors to the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and this contribution is expected to increase in the following years. This has encouraged the development of techniques to reduce the energy consumption and the environmental footprint of data centers. Whereas some of these techniques have succeeded to reduce the energy consumption of the hardware equipment of data centers (including IT, cooling, and power supply systems), we claim that sustainable data centers will be only possible if the problem is faced by means of a holistic approach that includes not only the aforementioned techniques but also intelligent and unifying solutions that enable a synergistic and energy-aware management of data centers. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers that uses the energy as a driver of their management procedures. In addition, we present a holistic management architecture for sustainable data centers that implements the aforementioned strategy, and we propose design guidelines to accomplish each step of the proposed strategy, referring to related achievements and enumerating the main challenges that must be still solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

CloudScope: diagnosing and managing performance interference in multi-tenant clouds

© 2015 IEEE.Virtual machine consolidation is attractive in cloud computing platforms for several reasons including reduced infrastructure costs, lower energy consumption and ease of management. However, the interference between co-resident workloads caused by virtualization can violate the service level objectives (SLOs) that the cloud platform guarantees. Existing solutions to minimize interference between virtual machines (VMs) are mostly based on comprehensive micro-benchmarks or online training which makes them computationally intensive. In this paper, we present CloudScope, a system for diagnosing interference for multi-tenant cloud systems in a lightweight way. CloudScope employs a discrete-time Markov Chain model for the online prediction of performance interference of co-resident VMs. It uses the results to optimally (re)assign VMs to physical machines and to optimize the hypervisor configuration, e.g. the CPU share it can use, for different workloads. We have implemented CloudScope on top of the Xen hypervisor and conducted experiments using a set of CPU, disk, and network intensive workloads and a real system (MapReduce). Our results show that CloudScope interference prediction achieves an average error of 9%. The interference-aware scheduler improves VM performance by up to 10% compared to the default scheduler. In addition, the hypervisor reconfiguration can improve network throughput by up to 30%

Energy-Aware Adaptive Four Thresholds Technique for Optimal Virtual Machine Placement

With the increasing expansion of cloud data centers and the demand for cloud services, one of the major problems facing these data centers is the “increasing growth in energy consumption ". In this paper, we propose a method to balance the burden of virtual machine resources in order to reduce energy consumption. The proposed technique is based on a four-adaptive threshold model to reduce energy consumption in physical servers and minimize SLA violation in cloud data centers. Based on the proposed technique, hosts will be grouped into five clusters: hosts with low load, hosts with a light load, hosts with a middle load, hosts with high load and finally, hosts with a heavy load. Virtual machines are transferred from the host with high load and heavy load to the hosts with light load. Also, the VMs on low hosts will be migrated to the hosts with middle load, while the host with a light load and hosts with middle load remain unchanged. The values of the thresholds are obtained on the basis of the mathematical modeling approach and the -Means Clustering Algorithm is used for clustering of hosts. Experimental results show that applying the proposed technique will improve the load balancing and reduce the number of VM migration and reduce energy consumption