Using Virtual Machine live migration in trace-driven energy-aware simulation of high-throughput computing systems

Abstract

Virtual Machine (VM) live migration is one of the strategic approaches that can be employed to reduce energy consumption and increase the utilisation of a large computing infrastructure. In this paper, we implement the pre-copy live migration algorithm to provide a test environment for live job migration in a high throughput computing system (HTC). We present details of our extension into the HTC-Sim simulation framework. Furthermore, we demonstrate the performance and energy impact of our responsive live migration approach in high throughput computing (HTC) systems with various migration policies. The proposed policies focus on which computer to select for migration from an HTC resource pool. We evaluate our migration policies through the use of our HTC-Sim simulation framework. Moreover, we compare the results between the policies as well as the system where migration is not considered. We demonstrate that our responsive migration could save approximately 75% of the system wasted energy due to job evictions by user interruptions where migration is not employed as a fault-tolerance mechanism.