Reliable and energy efficient resource provisioning in cloud computing systems

Cloud Computing has revolutionized the Information Technology sector by giving computing a perspective of service. The services of cloud computing can be accessed by users not knowing about the underlying system with easy-to-use portals. To provide such an abstract view, cloud computing systems have to perform many complex operations besides managing a large underlying infrastructure. Such complex operations confront service providers with many challenges such as security, sustainability, reliability, energy consumption and resource management. Among all the challenges, reliability and energy consumption are two key challenges focused on in this thesis because of their conflicting nature. Current solutions either focused on reliability techniques or energy efficiency methods. But it has been observed that mechanisms providing reliability in cloud computing systems can deteriorate the energy consumption. Adding backup resources and running replicated systems provide strong fault tolerance but also increase energy consumption. Reducing energy consumption by running resources on low power scaling levels or by reducing the number of active but idle sitting resources such as backup resources reduces the system reliability. This creates a critical trade-off between these two metrics that are investigated in this thesis. To address this problem, this thesis presents novel resource management policies which target the provisioning of best resources in terms of reliability and energy efficiency and allocate them to suitable virtual machines. A mathematical framework showing interplay between reliability and energy consumption is also proposed in this thesis. A formal method to calculate the finishing time of tasks running in a cloud computing environment impacted with independent and correlated failures is also provided. The proposed policies adopted various fault tolerance mechanisms while satisfying the constraints such as task deadlines and utility values. This thesis also provides a novel failure-aware VM consolidation method, which takes the failure characteristics of resources into consideration before performing VM consolidation. All the proposed resource management methods are evaluated by using real failure traces collected from various distributed computing sites. In order to perform the evaluation, a cloud computing framework, 'ReliableCloudSim' capable of simulating failure-prone cloud computing systems is developed. The key research findings and contributions of this thesis are: 1. If the emphasis is given only to energy optimization without considering reliability in a failure prone cloud computing environment, the results can be contrary to the intuitive expectations. Rather than reducing energy consumption, a system ends up consuming more energy due to the energy losses incurred because of failure overheads. 2. While performing VM consolidation in a failure prone cloud computing environment, a significant improvement in terms of energy efficiency and reliability can be achieved by considering failure characteristics of physical resources. 3. By considering correlated occurrence of failures during resource provisioning and VM allocation, the service downtime or interruption is reduced significantly by 34% in comparison to the environments with the assumption of independent occurrence of failures. Moreover, measured by our mathematical model, the ratio of reliability and energy consumption is improved by 14%

Advanced SiC/Oxide Interface Passivation

To save energy on an electric power grid, the idea of redesigned ‘micro-grids’ has been proposed. Implementation of this concept needs power devices that can operate at higher switching speeds and block voltages of up to 20 kV. Out of SiC and GaN wide band gap semiconductors, the former is more suitable for low- as well as high-voltage ranges. SiC exists in different polytypes 3C-, 4H- and 6H-. 4H-SiC due to its wider band gap, 3.26 eV has higher critical electric field of breakdown (Ec) and electron bulk mobility compared to 6H-SiC. Even with all these benefits 4H-SiC full potential has not yet been realized. This is due to high trap densities (Dit) at the interface. In addition to 4H-polytype, in recent years, there is a reignited interest on cubic silicon carbide (3C-SiC), which can be potentially grown heteroepitaxially on 12″ Si substrates, as it would result in a drastic cost reduction of semiconductor devices compared to the successful but exorbitantly expensive SiC hexagonal polytype technology (4H-SiC). In this chapter, we discuss and summarize all different interface passivation techniques or processes that have led to a vast improvement of these (4H- or 3C-SiC/SiO2) interfaces electrically

Implementation of 8 Point FFT with IEEE 754 Floating Format for OFDM System

No Abstrac

Synthesis of a reusable novel catalyst (β-tricalcium phosphate) for biodiesel production from a common Indian tribal feedstock

In recent times, the rate of energy consumption goes on increasing and the world is desperately searching for new sources of fuel. Biodiesel (fatty acid methyl esters) is an alternative renewable energy resource for the next generation. Biodiesel has several advantages which include its non-toxic nature, it is biodegradable and it reduces greenhouse gas emissions. β-Tricalcium phosphate (β-Ca3(PO4)2) catalyst was synthesized from fish waste. Fish waste contains calcium phosphate which is converted into β-tricalcium phosphate since it has low crystallinity and hydroxyl (OH) groups which decrease the potential to be a good catalyst for the synthesis of biodiesel through transesterification. This paper explores the synthesis of biodiesel using β-tricalcium phosphate (β-Ca3(PO4)2) as a heterogeneous catalyst. Pongamia pinnata (Karanja) oil was extracted from seeds through the solvent extraction process. Intended for the development of easier transesterification process, stable and active heterogeneous β-tricalcium phosphate (β-Ca3(PO4)2) catalyst was synthesized and used for the P. pinnata (Karanja) oil transesterifi- cation process. The synthesized heterogeneous catalyst was characterized by XRD, FT-IR, SEM and EDX to determine its structural and morphological characteristics