Prediction of CPU Utilization in Cloud Environment during Seasonal Trend

Today, the most recent paradigm to emerge is that of Cloud computing, which promises reliable services delivered to the end-user through next-generation data centres which are built on virtualized compute and storage technologies Consumer will be able to access desired service from a “Cloud” anytime anywhere in the world on the bases of demand. Computing services need to be highly reliable, scalable, easy accessible and autonomic to support ever-present access, dynamic discovery and computability, consumers indicate the required service level through Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, according to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) A suitable mdel for the prediction is being developed. Here Genetic Algorithm is chosen in combination with stastical model to do the workload prediction .It is expected to give better result by producing less error rate and more accuracy of prediction compared to the previous algorithm

State Capacity and Non-state Service Provision in Fragile and Conflict-affected States

How can governments effectively engage with non-state providers (NSPs) of basic services where capacity is weak? This paper examines whether and how fragile and conflict affected states can co-ordinate, finance, and set and apply standards for the provision of basic services by NSPs. It explores ways of incrementally engaging the state, beginning with activities that are least likely to do harm to non-state provision. Through the ‘indirect’ roles of setting the policy environment and engaging in policy dialogue, regulating and facilitating, contracting, and entering into mutual and informal agreements with NSPs, the state can in principle assume responsibility for the provision of basic services without necessarily being involved in direct provision. But government capacity to perform these roles is constrained by the state’s weak legitimacy, coverage and competence, lack of basic information about the non-state sector, and lack of basic organisational capacity to form and maintain relationships with NSPs. The experience of the exercise of the indirect roles in fragile settings suggests: * Governments may be more willing to engage with NSPs where there is recognition that government cannot alone deliver all services, where public and private services are not in competition, and where there is evidence that successful collaboration is possible (demonstrated through small-scale pilots). * The extent to which engagements are ‘pro-service’may be influenced by government motives for engagement and the extent to which the providers that are most important to poor people are engaged. * Formal policy dialogue between government and NSPs may be imperfect, unrepresentative and at times unhelpful in fragile settings. Informal dialogue - at the operational level - could more likely be where synergies can be found. * Regulation is more likely to be ‘pro-service’ where it offers incentives for compliance, and where it focuses on standards in terms of outputs and outcomes rather than inputs and entry controls. * Wide scale, performance-based contracting has been successful in delivering services in some cases, but the sustainability of this approach is often questioned. Some successful contractual agreements have a strong informal, relational element and grow out of earlier informal connections. * Informal and mutual agreements can avoid the capacity problems and tensions implicit in formal contracting but may present problems of non-transparency and exclusion of competition. Paradoxically, the need for large-scale approaches and quick co-ordination of services in fragile and conflict-affected settings may require ‘prematurely high’ levels of state-NSP engagement, before the development of the underlying institutional structures that would support them. When considering strategies to support the capacity of government to engagement with NSPs, donors should: * Recognise non-state service provision and adopt the ‘do no harm’ principle: It would be wrong to set the ambition of 'managing ‘ non-state provision in its entirety, and it can be very harmful for low-capacity states to seek to regulate all NSP or to draw it into clumsy contracts. * Beware of generalisation: Non-state provision takes many forms in response to different histories and to political and economic change. The possibilities and case for state engagement have to be assessed not assumed. The particular identities of NGOs and enterprises should be considered. * Recognise that state building can occur through any of the types of engagement with NSPs: Types of engagement should therefore be selected on the basis of their likely effectiveness in improving service delivery. * Begin with less risky/small scale forms of engagement where possible: State interventions that imply a direct controlling role for the state and which impose obligations on NSPs (i.e. contracting and regulation) require greater capacity (on both sides) and present greater risk of harm if performed badly than the roles of policy dialogue and entering into mutual agreements. * Adopt mixed approaches: The choice between forms of engagement does not have to be absolute. Rather than adopting a uniform plan of engagement in a particular country, it may be better to try different approaches in different regions or sectors

Economic impact of energy saving techniques in cloud server

In recent years, lot of research has been carried in the field of cloud computing and distributed systems to investigate and understand their performance. Economic impact of energy consumption is of major concern for major companies. Cloud Computing companies (Google, Yahoo, Gaikai, ONLIVE, Amazon and eBay) use large data centers which are comprised of virtual computers that are placed globally and require a lot of power cost to maintain. Demand for energy consumption is increasing day by day in IT firms. Therefore, Cloud Computing companies face challenges towards the economic impact in terms of power costs. Energy consumption is dependent upon several factors, e.g., service level agreement, virtual machine selection techniques, optimization policies, workload types etc. We address a solution for the energy saving problem by enabling dynamic voltage and frequency scaling technique for gaming data centers. The dynamic voltage and frequency scaling technique is compared against non-power aware and static threshold detection techniques. This helps service providers to meet the quality of service and quality of experience constraints by meeting service level agreements. The CloudSim platform is used for implementation of the scenario in which game traces are used as a workload for testing the technique. Selection of better techniques can help gaming servers to save energy cost and maintain a better quality of service for users placed globally. The novelty of the work provides an opportunity to investigate which technique behaves better, i.e., dynamic, static or non-power aware. The results demonstrate that less energy is consumed by implementing a dynamic voltage and frequency approach in comparison with static threshold consolidation or non-power aware technique. Therefore, more economical quality of services could be provided to the end users

The SADC protocol on trade in services : a review of the protocol in light of the GATS and other SADC protocols and what it means for trade in services in the region

In 1995 the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) came into force. This is the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) legal instrument aimed at regulating multilateral trade in services (TiS). GATS was negotiated in light of the increase in TiS in the world and the need to regulate this area of trade. Prior to GATS coming into force, only trade in goods was regulated at the multilateral level through the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). There are many benefits that come along with TiS and there is a need for developing countries to open up their service markets. Liberalised TiS in developing countries can bring about technological advancement, it enhances competition, it creates employment and it enhances productivity. Opening up the services sector brings about more service suppliers into the economy. The increase in service suppliers means that there will be competition and competition eliminates inefficiency and gives consumers access to a variety of services at low prices. The service areas that SADC countries have comparative advantage in such as tourism and transport are labour intensive, the opening of such sectors will therefore be employment creating across the region. In more technologically complex service areas (like telecommunications) the liberalisation of such sectors allows those countries that trade in such services to spill-over the technical know-how to other countries in the region. Among some of the provisions of GATS that regulate TiS are provisions that define services, identify services areas and modes of trading in services. GATS provides for member states to accord treatment no less favourable than that they give to their services and service suppliers to services and service suppliers that come from other members (MFN treatment). Services from members are also to be afforded national treatment when traded in the territory of another member. The national treatment afforded to services differs from that in GATT in that unlike in GATT national treatment under GATS only comes about as a result of specific commitments made by each member. There are some exceptions to the general rules of GATS. One such exception allows for the establishment of a preferential trade agreements to regulate TiS in a region. In terms of Article V member states can enter into preferential trade agreements to regulate their TiS. The preferential trade agreements established in terms of Article V allow the parties thereto to extend more favourable conditions to the services and service suppliers from the countries that are member states without extending them to the rest of the WTO members.0 In order to satisfy Article V it must be shown that the agreement in question covers a substantial number of sectors and that it eliminates or provides for the substantial elimination of discrimination. There is some flexibility that is however afforded to preferential agreements entered into by developing countries in so far as the elimination of discrimination is concerned. SADC is a Regional Economic Community that was established in 1992 in terms of the SADC Treaty. The SADC treaty provides for the regulation of trade.14 It also provides for the concluding of Protocols when the need arises. In light of the provisions of the treaty and of GATS Article V, SADC recently concluded the SADC Protocol on Trade in Services (SADC TiS Protocol). The Protocol is aimed at liberalising substantial TiS in the Southern African region while at the same time ensuring that the treaty remains consistent with other Protocols that precede it. In light of the provisions of GATS the paper will carry out an analysis of the SADC TiS Protocol. The paper will consider the requirements that GATS places on preferential agreements and assess how far the SADC TiS Protocol goes in satisfying the requirements

Developments in Collectively Agreed Working Time 2013

This annual report covers several issues related to the length of working time in the European Union and Norway in 2013. It is based mainly on contributions from the national correspondents to Eurofound’s European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO). This edition includes data from Croatia, which became a Member State on 1 July 2013. The report looks specifically at: average weekly working hours set by collective agreements, both economy-wide and for three specific sectors: chemicals, the retail trade and the civil service; statutory limits on weekly and daily working time; average actual weekly working hours; annual leave entitlements, as set by collective agreements and law; estimates of average collectively agreed annual working time

Generic Methods for Adaptive Management of Service Level Agreements in Cloud Computing

The adoption of cloud computing to build and deliver application services has been nothing less than phenomenal. Service oriented systems are being built using disparate sources composed of web services, replicable datastores, messaging, monitoring and analytics functions and more. Clouds augment these systems with advanced features such as high availability, customer affinity and autoscaling on a fair pay-per-use cost model. The challenge lies in using the utility paradigm of cloud beyond its current exploit. Major trends show that multi-domain synergies are creating added-value service propositions. This raises two questions on autonomic behaviors, which are specifically ad- dressed by this thesis. The first question deals with mechanism design that brings the customer and provider(s) together in the procurement process. The purpose is that considering customer requirements for quality of service and other non functional properties, service dependencies need to be efficiently resolved and legally stipulated. The second question deals with effective management of cloud infrastructures such that commitments to customers are fulfilled and the infrastructure is optimally operated in accordance with provider policies. This thesis finds motivation in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to answer these questions. The role of SLAs is explored as instruments to build and maintain trust in an economy where services are increasingly interdependent. The thesis takes a wholesome approach and develops generic methods to automate SLA lifecycle management, by identifying and solving relevant research problems. The methods afford adaptiveness in changing business landscape and can be localized through policy based controls. A thematic vision that emerges from this work is that business models, services and the delivery technology are in- dependent concepts that can be finely knitted together by SLAs. Experimental evaluations support the message of this thesis, that exploiting SLAs as foundations for market innovation and infrastructure governance indeed holds win-win opportunities for both cloud customers and cloud providers

Adaptive monitoring and control framework in Application Service Management environment

The economics of data centres and cloud computing services have pushed hardware and software requirements to the limits, leaving only very small performance overhead before systems get into saturation. For Application Service Management–ASM, this carries the growing risk of impacting the execution times of various processes. In order to deliver a stable service at times of great demand for computational power, enterprise data centres and cloud providers must implement fast and robust control mechanisms that are capable of adapting to changing operating conditions while satisfying service–level agreements. In ASM practice, there are normally two methods for dealing with increased load, namely increasing computational power or releasing load. The first approach typically involves allocating additional machines, which must be available, waiting idle, to deal with high demand situations. The second approach is implemented by terminating incoming actions that are less important to new activity demand patterns, throttling, or rescheduling jobs. Although most modern cloud platforms, or operating systems, do not allow adaptive/automatic termination of processes, tasks or actions, it is administrators’ common practice to manually end, or stop, tasks or actions at any level of the system, such as at the level of a node, function, or process, or kill a long session that is executing on a database server. In this context, adaptive control of actions termination remains a significantly underutilised subject of Application Service Management and deserves further consideration. For example, this approach may be eminently suitable for systems with harsh execution time Service Level Agreements, such as real–time systems, or systems running under conditions of hard pressure on power supplies, systems running under variable priority, or constraints set up by the green computing paradigm. Along this line of work, the thesis investigates the potential of dimension relevance and metrics signals decomposition as methods that would enable more efficient action termination. These methods are integrated in adaptive control emulators and actuators powered by neural networks that are used to adjust the operation of the system to better conditions in environments with established goals seen from both system performance and economics perspectives. The behaviour of the proposed control framework is evaluated using complex load and service agreements scenarios of systems compatible with the requirements of on–premises, elastic compute cloud deployments, server–less computing, and micro–services architectures

Proposed U.S.-South Korea Free Trade Agreement and Potential Employment Effects: Analysis of Studies

[Excerpt] Similar to other trade agreements, the proposed U.S.-South Korea Free Trade Agreement(KORUS-FTA) has attracted both supporters and detractors, primarily over the impact the agreement could have on employment in the economy. Supporters argue that the agreement could create as many as 280,000 jobs in the economy. Others, however, argue that the agreement could lead to an overall loss of up to 159,000 jobs in various sectors of the economy. Still others contend that the United States stands to lose exports, employment, and extended economic opportunities if it fails to sign a trade agreement, while the European Union and other nations are lining up to finalize similar agreements with South Korea. Estimating the economic impact of trade agreements, however, is a daunting task, due to a lack of data and important theoretical and practical matters associated with generating results from economic models. In addition, such estimates provide an incomplete accounting of the total economic effects of trade agreements. This report assesses the results of a number of models that are being used to generate estimates of the effect of the KORUS FTA on employment. These studies were chosen specifically because they estimate (or can be used to estimate) data on employment effects of the trade agreement. All economic models incorporate various assumptions that are necessary in order for the model to generate results. Invariably, these approaches determine, to some extent, the results that are generated and, therefore, limit their representation of the real world economy. Currently, the various models produce widely disparate estimates of the number of jobs affected by the trade agreement, reflecting the various assumptions that are used in the models and differences in the approaches

Mind the gap: National and local partnership in the Irish public sector

This article uses case study data from a major Irish city council to investigate and explain public sector worker attitudes towards social partnership at local and national level. It is argued that the more sceptical attitudes to workplace partnership reflect structural differences between local and national arrangements, which have enabled public sector employers to use ‘social partnership’ as a constraint in the implementation process of a pre-determined public sector reform agenda