'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
Commercial and private cloud providers offer virtualized resources via a set of co-located
and dedicated hosts that are exclusively reserved for the purpose of offering
a cloud service. While both cloud models appeal to the mass market, there are many
cases where outsourcing to a remote platform or procuring an in-house infrastructure
may not be ideal or even possible.
To offer an attractive alternative, we introduce and develop an ad hoc cloud computing
platform to transform spare resource capacity from an infrastructure owner’s
locally available, but non-exclusive and unreliable infrastructure, into an overlay cloud
platform. The foundation of the ad hoc cloud relies on transferring and instantiating
lightweight virtual machines on-demand upon near-optimal hosts while virtual machine
checkpoints are distributed in a P2P fashion to other members of the ad hoc
cloud. Virtual machines found to be non-operational are restored elsewhere ensuring
the continuity of cloud jobs.
In this thesis we investigate the feasibility, reliability and performance of ad hoc
cloud computing infrastructures. We firstly show that the combination of both volunteer
computing and virtualization is the backbone of the ad hoc cloud. We outline the
process of virtualizing the volunteer system BOINC to create V-BOINC. V-BOINC
distributes virtual machines to volunteer hosts allowing volunteer applications to be
executed in the sandbox environment to solve many of the downfalls of BOINC; this
however also provides the basis for an ad hoc cloud computing platform to be developed.
We detail the challenges of transforming V-BOINC into an ad hoc cloud and outline
the transformational process and integrated extensions. These include a BOINC job
submission system, cloud job and virtual machine restoration schedulers and a periodic
P2P checkpoint distribution component. Furthermore, as current monitoring tools are
unable to cope with the dynamic nature of ad hoc clouds, a dynamic infrastructure
monitoring and management tool called the Cloudlet Control Monitoring System is
developed and presented.
We evaluate each of our individual contributions as well as the reliability, performance
and overheads associated with an ad hoc cloud deployed on a realistically
simulated unreliable infrastructure. We conclude that the ad hoc cloud is not only a
feasible concept but also a viable computational alternative that offers high levels of
reliability and can at least offer reasonable performance, which at times may exceed
the performance of a commercial cloud infrastructure