Energy-efficient Cloud Research Articles

Type-aware virtual machine management for energy efficient cloud data centers

To meet the growing demands on cloud services and applications, a sizeable number of large scale cloud data centers, hosting thousands of heterogeneous servers, is established by cloud service providers. The ever growth in establishing cloud data centers is accompanied by consuming enormous amounts of energy. Thus, proposing efficient management approaches to reduce the energy consumption in cloud data centers becomes a top priority for ensuring the scalability of the cloud computing architecture. In general, the main source of energy overconsumption in today’s data centers is due to the inefficient use of the physical servers’ resources, which results in poor server utilization patterns. So, the key aspect is to utilize the physical resources optimally while serving the cloud user demands. This paper investigates the design and implementation of virtual machine management strategies for energy efficient cloud data centers. Particularly, it considers the processes of virtual machine placement and virtual machine consolidation in enhancing the energy efficiency in cloud infrastructures. While addressing the virtual machine placement problem is important, virtual machine consolidation is even more important to enable continuous reorganization of the already-placed virtual machines on the least number of physical machines. This results in reducing the number of active physical machines by leveraging live virtual machine migration enabled by the virtualization concept. Moreover, since the virtual machine migration operations consume additional energy, the frequency of VM migrations needs to be limited and controlled as well. The paper presents a distributed approach to an energy-efficient dynamic virtual machine consolidation mechanism. This approach determines, based on novel algorithms, which virtual machines to migrate, and when. Then, the placement of the virtual machines selected for migration is achieved based on a generalization of the Knapsack Problem known as the Multiple Choice Knapsack Problem. The placement process suits both static and dynamic virtual machine placement. The results of the performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed new algorithms are able to enhance the energy efficiency in cloud data centers.

Application-Triggered Automatic Distributed Cloud/Network Resource Coordination by Optically Networked Inter/Intra Data Center [Invited

Everything is being connected to the Cloud and Internet of Things, and network robots with big data analy- sis are creating important applications and services. The cloud network architecture is moving towards mega-cloud data centers (DCs) provided by companies such as Amazon and Google in combination with distributed small DCs or edge computers. While the traditional restrictions im- posed by distance and bandwidth are being overcome by the development of advanced optical interconnection, modern applications impose more complex performance and quality of service requirements in terms of processing power, response time, and data amount. The rise in cloud perfor- mance must be matched by improvements in network per- formance. Therefore, we propose an application-triggered cloud network architecture based on huge-bandwidth optical interconnections. This paper addresses edge/center cloud and edge/edge integration with the use of virtual ma- chine migration. In addition, to reduce energy consumption, an application-triggered intra-DC architecture is described. Using the proposed architectures and technologies can real- ize energy-efficient and high-performance cloud service.

Data analytics for energy-efficient clouds: design, implementation and evaluation

ABSTRACTThe success of Cloud Computing and the resulting ever growing of large data centers is causing a huge rise in electrical power consumption by hardware facilities and cooling systems. This results in an increment of operational costs of data centres, that is becoming a crucial issue to deal with. Consolidation of virtual machines (VM) is one of the key strategies used to reduce the power consumption of Cloud servers. For this reason, it is extensively studied. Consolidation has the goal of allocating virtual machines on a few physical servers as possible while satisfying the Service Level Agreement established with users. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of a consolidation strategy strongly depends on the forecast of the VM resource needs. Predictive data mining models can be exploited for this purpose. This paper describes the design and development of a system for energy-aware allocation of virtual machines, driven by predictive data mining models. In particular, migrations are driven by the forecast of the future computational needs (CPU, RAM) of each virtual machine, in order to efficiently allocate those on the available servers. The experimental evaluation, performed on real-world Cloud data traces, reports a comparison of performance achieved by exploiting several classification models and shows good benefits in terms of energy saving.

Energy efficient job scheduling with workload prediction on cloud data center

Data centers are the backbone of cloud infrastructure platform to support large-scale data processing and storage. More and more business-to-consumer and enterprise applications are based on cloud data center. However, the amount of data center energy consumption is inevitably lead to high operation costs. The aim of this paper is to comprehensive reduce energy consumption of cloud data center servers, network, and cooling systems. We first build an energy efficient cloud data center system including its architecture, job and power consumption model. Then, we combine the linear regression and wavelet neural network techniques into a prediction method, which we call MLWNN, to forecast the cloud data center short-term workload. Third, we propose a heuristic energy efficient job scheduling with workload prediction solution, which is divided into resource management strategy and online energy efficient job scheduling algorithm. Our extensive simulation performance evaluation results clearly demonstrate that our proposed solution has good performance and is very suitable for low workload cloud data center.

Analyzing Energy-Efficiency of Two Scheduling Policies in Compute-Intensive Applications on Cloud

One of the key problems facing cloud applications is to reduce their energy consumption, which can increase the working lifetime of a machine, decrease the operation costs of cloud providers, and the environmental impact caused by power consumption. It is very important to design and evaluate an energy-efficient cloud. Recently, two open problems are raised in the literature: 1) what is the optimal solution (the lower bound) for the total energy consumption? and 2) what is the energy-efficiency for a scheduling algorithm? In this paper, we consider two major scheduling policies: 1) always power-on physical machines (PMs) once turning-on and 2) turning-off (hibernating) idle PMs, both with possible virtual machine migrations during evaluation. Focusing on compute-intensive applications on cloud, we propose analytical methods to settle down the two open problems. Our theoretical results are validated by experimental results in different scheduling scenarios and can be applied in cloud computing environments to help energy-efficient design.

EA Based Approach for Resource Allocation in Cloud Computing

Appealing to the requirement of energy savings, many approaches of energy-efficient locating sensing have been explored. Methods beyond the action of locating are somehow auxiliary, and most of the attentions are focused on locating sensing based methods. A class of lightweight positioning systems has been developed to explore a large part of the energy-accuracy trade-off space. These systems either reduce accuracy requirements, or aggressively use other cues to determine when and where to turn on EA. Implicitly or explicitly, these systems generally make several assumptions about the environment or about user activity. In this research, we proposed an energy efficient cloud based VM in which tasks can be achieved using better SLA and less energy.

Energy Aware Resource Management of Cloud Data Centers

Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Virtualization technology forms a key concept for new cloud computing architectures. The data centers are used to provide cloud services burdening a significant cost due to high energy consumption. Data centers are provisioned to accommodate peak demand rather than average demand and cloud applications consume much more electrical energy than they need. Thus, it necessitates that cloud computing solutions not only minimize operational costs, but also reduce the power consumption. In this paper, we investigate load balancing and power saving methods in virtualized cloud infrastructures. Imbalanced distribution of workloads across resources can lead to performance degradation and much electrical power consumption in such data centers. We present an architectural framework and principles for energy-efficient cloud computing environments. Resource provisioning and allocation algorithms, named Load-Power-aware, are proposed in this architecture. The algorithm employs a heuristic to dynamically improve the energy efficiency in data center, while guarantees the Quality of Service (QoS). The efficiency of the proposed approach is evaluated by using the most common cloud computing simulation toolkit, CloudSim. The performance modeling and simulation results are depicted the proposed approach significantly improves the energy efficiency in a given dynamic scenario, while a small amount of service level agreements (SLA) is missed.

Task Deadline-Aware Energy-Efficient Scheduling Model for a Virtualized Cloud

Data centers in cloud environment consume high amount of energy which not only raises the electricity bills of the data center hosting organizations but also has the strong environmental footprints. Therefore, energy efficiency of the data centers has become an important research issue. Many energy efficiency approaches have been proposed in the literature for cloud. Efficient resource scheduling is one of the important approaches to achieve energy efficiency in cloud. In this paper, a task deadline-aware energy-efficient scheduling model for virtualized cloud is presented. Independent and dynamically arriving deadline-aware tasks are scheduled by virtualizing the physical hosts in the data center. The proposed scheduling model at the first instance achieves the energy efficiency by executing maximum workload in the operational state of the host and at the second instance by maximum energy saving in the idle state of the host. In the operational state of the host, maximum workload is executed by exploiting the task slack time in a new context, and in the idle state of the host, maximum energy is saved by deploying core-level granularity of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. The presented scheduling model is evaluated on the synthetic and real-world workload. Results clearly indicate that the presented scheduling model outperforms the existing scheduling model on the account of performance parameters of guarantee ratio, total energy consumption, energy consumption per task and resource utilization.

Towards energy aware cloud computing application construction

The energy consumption of cloud computing continues to be an area of significant concern as data center growth continues to increase. This paper reports on an energy efficient interoperable cloud architecture realised as a cloud toolbox that focuses on reducing the energy consumption of cloud applications holistically across all deployment models. The architecture supports energy efficiency at service construction, deployment and operation. We discuss our practical experience during implementation of an architectural component, the Virtual Machine Image Constructor (VMIC), required to facilitate construction of energy aware cloud applications. We carry out a performance evaluation of the component on a cloud testbed. The results show the performance of Virtual Machine construction, primarily limited by available I/O, to be adequate for agile, energy aware software development. We conclude that the implementation of the VMIC is feasible, incurs minimal performance overhead comparatively to the time taken by other aspects of the cloud application construction life-cycle, and make recommendations on enhancing its performance.

Penalty migration as a performance signaling method in energy-efficient clouds

The concept of energy efficiency in clouds has gradually evolved and now includes not only traditional CPU and memory utilizations but also network traffic, number of migrations, etc. Recent literature also shows that the most energy efficient migration schedule is one that, in addition to minimizing migration count, also manages to vacate the most physical machines, thus allowing them to be powered down. While it is obvious that such migration schedules depend on frequent changes in VM-to-PM mapping layouts, existing literature does not offer any practical strategies to that effect. This paper retains the basic notion that lowering the number of migrations and powering down PMs contribute to a level of energy efficiency, but also proposes a new notion called penalty migration. In this paper, the Service and the Cloud have an SLA that spells out an effective range of operations for the Service’s applications, which, if the range is exceeded, can be penalized by the Cloud in several ways discussed in this paper. In addition to higher fluidity, the proposed strategies also improve QoS from the viewpoint of the Cloud’s resources as well as individual service populations. In turn, services can benefit from penalty migrations, treating migration events as QoS monitoring data. This proposal is the first known attempt to distribute the task of performance management between cloud and service providers, where penalty migrations are a form of signaling between the two roles.

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Issue on Green and Energy-Efficient Cloud Computing Part II

The papers in this special section focus on green and energy efficient cloud computing. Cloud computing has had a huge commercial impact and has attracted the interest of the research community. Public clouds allow their customers to outsource the management of physical resources, and rent a variable amount of resources in accordance to their specific needs. Private clouds allow companies to manage on-premises resources, exploiting the capabilities offered by the cloud technologies, such as using virtualization to improve resource utilization and cloud software for resource management automation. Hybrid clouds, where private infrastructures are integrated and complemented by external resources, are becoming a common scenario as well, for example to manage load peaks. Cloud applications are hosted by data centers whose size ranges from tens to tens of thousands of servers, which raises significant challenges related to energy and cost management. It has been estimated that the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry alone is responsible for 2-3 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, we must find innovative methods and tools to manage the energy efficiency and carbon footprint of data centers, so that they can operate and scale in a cost-effective and environmentally sustainable manner. These methods and tools are often categorized as Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) to monitor, control, and optimize data centers with extensive automation. DCIM must also effectively manage the quality of service provided by the data center, since cloud customers require high reliability, availability, usability, and low response times.

Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Algorithms and Computational Models for Sustainable Computing in Cloud and Data Centers

The papers in this special section focus on the development of algorithms and computational models for sustainable computing in cloud and data centers. These papers bring together high quality contributions covering the topics of energy efficiency cloud computing, advances in sustainable cloud and data centers, energy aware applications at various levels of the computational and data storage processes, and emerging trends in sustainable computing. New research findings, novel approaches, and algorithms are presented for energy-efficient Cloud computing, energy-aware memory management solutions for data centers and processing of large data sets, energy aware scheduling approaches for data centers and processing of large data sets, energy consumption computational models, analytics and performance evaluations, and applications as well as emerging trends and applications.

An energy-aware service composition algorithm for multiple cloud-based IoT applications

There has been a shift in research towards the convergence of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and cloud computing paradigms motivated by the need for IoT applications to leverage the unique characteristics of the cloud. IoT acts as an enabler to interconnect intelligent and self-configurable nodes “things” to establish an efficient and dynamic platform for communication and collaboration. IoT is becoming a major source of big data, contributing huge amounts of streamed information from a large number of interconnected nodes, which have to be stored, processed, and presented in an efficient, and easily interpretable form. Cloud computing can enable IoT to have the privilege of a virtual resources utilization infrastructure, which integrates storage devices, visualization platforms, resource monitoring, analytical tools, and client delivery. Given the number of things connected and the amount of data generated, a key challenge is the energy efficient composition and interoperability of heterogeneous things integrated with cloud resources and scattered across the globe, in order to create an on-demand energy efficient cloud based IoT application. In many cases, when a single service is not enough to complete the business requirement; a composition of web services is carried out. These composed web services are expected to collaborate towards a common goal with large amount of data exchange and various other operations. Massive data sets have to be exchanged between several geographically distributed and scattered services. The movement of mass data between services influences the whole application process in terms of energy consumption. One way to significantly reduce this massive data exchange is to use fewer services for a composition, which need to be created to complete a business requirement. Integrating fewer services can result in a reduction in data interchange, which in return helps in reducing the energy consumption and carbon footprint.This paper develops a novel multi-cloud IoT service composition algorithm called (E2C2) that aims at creating an energy-aware composition plan by searching for and integrating the least possible number of IoT services, in order to fulfil user requirements. A formal user requirements translation and transformation modelling and analysis is adopted for the proposed algorithm. The algorithm was evaluated against four established service composition algorithms in multiple cloud environments (All clouds, Base cloud, Smart cloud, and COM2), with the results demonstrating the superior performance of our approach.

An evergreen cloud: Optimizing energy efficiency in heterogeneous cloud computing architectures

In a heterogeneous Cloud network scenario where a Cloud computing data center serves mobile Cloud computing requests, Cloud providers are expected to implement more innovative and effective solutions for a list of long standing challenges. Energy efficiency in the Cloud data center is one of the more pressing issues near the top of that list. Cloud providers are in constant pursuit of a system that satisfies client demands for resources, maximizes availability and other service level agreement metrics while minimizing energy consumption and, in turn, minimizing Cloud providers' cost.In this work, we introduce a novel mathematical optimization model to solve the problem of energy efficiency in a cloud data center. Next, we offer a solution based on VM migration that tackles this problem and minimizes energy efficiency in comparison to other common solutions. This solution includes a novel proposed technique to be integrated in any consolidation-based energy efficiency solution. This technique depends on dynamic idleness prediction (DIP) using machine learning classifiers. Moreover, we offer a robust energy efficiency scheduling solution that does not depend on live migration. This technique, termed Smart VM Over Provision (SVOP), offers a major advantage to cloud providers in the cases when live migration of VMs is not preferred due to its effects on performance. We evaluate the aforementioned solutions in terms of a number of critical metrics, namely, energy used per server, energy used per served request, acceptance rate, and the number of migrations performed.

A framework for computational offloading to extend the energy of mobile devices in mobile cloud computing

In this paper, we devise a novel offloading policy for energy efficient mobile cloud computing. Limitations, such as poor processing ability and limited battery life, make it difficult for mobile devices to process complex computational tasks. The mobile devices in traditional local processing find it difficult to execute high-bandwidth-consuming videos, and solve this problem by offloading complex executions of the application onto cloud computing to minimise the processing requirements and energy consumption of the mobile device, thereby overcoming the limitations of poor processing ability and limited battery life of said mobile device. The energy efficient framework focuses on mobile cloud computing (MCC), which employs computational offloading for computationally intensive mobile applications on the mobile devices. An input device, namely, a virtual network computing (VNC) client, is installed on the local mobile device and connected to the VNC server, which is installed in the cloud. Energy consumption of the selected application is reduced up to 67.19% by computational offloading compared to traditional methods. The results were observed to be encouraging.

Optimal Control Theory-Based Epidemic Information Spreading Scheme for Mobile Social Users With Energy Constraint

With the rapid development of energy-efficient cloud computing technologies, mobile users can share information with each other in different communities. However, due to the ever-increasing population of mobile users and the scale of networks, the energy-efficient delivery of information in mobile social networks (MSNs) becomes a new challenge. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an optimal control theory-based epidemic information spreading scheme for mobile users with energy constraint. First, we divide the social relationships of mobile users into four types based on blood, geography, work, and interest relationship. Second, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the influences of social relationships on the information spreading process in MSNs. Third, we present a control theory-based information spreading scheme to optimize the tradeoff between the consumed energy and delay. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the presented scheme can save the energy and improve the quality of experience during information spreading for mobile users.

Energy-efficient cloud computing with task consolidation

Energy-efficient cloud computing with task consolidation

Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling‐aware dynamic consolidation of virtual machines for energy efficient cloud data centers

SummaryComputational demand in data centers is increasing because of the growing popularity of Cloud applications. However, data centers are becoming unsustainable in terms of power consumption and growing energy costs so Cloud providers have to face the major challenge of placing them on a more scalable curve. Also, Cloud services are provided under strict Service Level Agreement conditions, so trade‐offs between energy and performance have to be taken into account. Techniques as Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and consolidation are commonly used to reduce the energy consumption in data centers, although they are applied independently and their effects on Quality of Service are not always considered. Thus, understanding the relationship between power, DVFS, consolidation, and performance is crucial to enable energy‐efficient management at the data center level. In this work, we propose a DVFS policy that reduces power consumption while preventing performance degradation, and a DVFS‐aware consolidation policy that optimizes consumption, considering the DVFS configuration that would be necessary when mapping Virtual Machines to maintain Quality of Service. We have performed an extensive evaluation on the CloudSim toolkit using real Cloud traces and an accurate power model based on data gathered from real servers. Our results demonstrate that including DVFS awareness in workload management provides substantial energy savings of up to 41.62% for scenarios under dynamic workload conditions. These outcomes outperforms previous approaches, that do not consider integrated use of DVFS and consolidation strategies.

Towards energy efficient cloud: an optimized ant colony model for virtual machine placement

A virtual machine placement optimization model based on optimized ant colony algorithm is proposed. The model is able to determine the physical machines suitable for hosting migrated virtual machines. Thus, it solves the problem of redundant power consumption resulting from idle resource waste of physical machines. First, based on the utilization parameters of the virtual machine, idle resources and energy consumption models are proposed. The models are dedicated to quantifying the features of virtual resource utilization and energy consumption of physical machines. Next, a multi-objective optimization strategy is derived for virtual machine placement in cloud environments. Finally, an optimal virtual machines placement scheme is determined based on feature metrics, multi-objective optimization, and the ant colony algorithm. Experimental results indicate that compared with the traditional genetic algorithms-based MGGA model, the convergence rate is increased by 16%, and the optimized highest average energy consumption is reduced by 18%. The model exhibits advantages in terms of algorithm efficiency and efficacy.

E-eco: Performance-aware energy-efficient cloud data center orchestration

The high energy consumption of data centers has been a recurring issue in recent research. In cloud environments, several techniques are being used that aim for energy efficiency, ranging from scaling the processors frequency, to the use of sleep states during idle periods and the consolidation of virtual machines. Although these techniques enable a reduction in power consumption, they usually impact application performance. In this paper, we present an orchestration of different energy-savings techniques in order to improve the trade-off between energy consumption and application performance. To this end, we implemented the Energy-Efficient Cloud Orchestrator - e-eco - a management system that acts along with the cloud load balancer deciding which technique to apply during execution. To evaluate e-eco, tests were carried out in a real environment using scale-out applications on a dynamic cloud infrastructure, taking into account transactions per second as a performance metric. In addition to the empirical experiments, we also analyzed the scalability of our approach with an enhanced version of the CloudSim simulator. Results of our evaluations demonstrated that e-eco is able to reduce energy consumption up to 25% compared to power-agnostic approaches at a cost of only 6% of extra SLA violations. When compared to existing power-aware approaches, e-eco achieved the best trade-off between performance and energy-savings. These results showed that our orchestration approach showed a better balance in regard to a more energy-efficient data center with smaller impact on application performance when compared with other works presented in the literature.