Virtual Machine Configurations Research Articles

Power system low delay resource scheduling model based on edge computing node

As more and more intelligent devices are put into the field of power system, the number of connected nodes in the power network is increasing exponentially. Under the background of smart grid cooperation across power areas and voltage levels, how to effectively process the massive data generated by smart grid has become a difficult problem to ensure the stable operation of power system. In the complex calculation process of power system, the operation time of complex calculation can not be shortened to the greatest extent, and the execution efficiency can not be improved. Therefore, this paper proposes a two-phase heuristic algorithm based on edge computing. In solving the virtual machine sequence problem, for the main partition and the coordination partition, the critical path algorithm is used to sort the virtual machines to minimize the computing time. For other sub-partitions, the minimum cut algorithm is used to reduce the traffic interaction of each sub-partition. In the second stage of the virtual machine placement process, an improved best fit algorithm is used to avoid poor placement of virtual machines across physical machine configurations, resulting in increased computing time. Through the experiment on the test system, it is proved that the calculation efficiency is improved when the coordinated partition calculation belongs to the target partition. Because the edge computing is closer to the data source, it can save more data transmission time than cloud computing. This paper provides an effective algorithm for power system distributed computing in virtual machine configuration in edge computing, which can effectively reduce the computing time of power system and improve the efficiency of system resource utilization.

Energy and Reliability-Aware Task Scheduling for Cost Optimization of DVFS-Enabled Cloud Workflows

Due to the increasing complexity, the execution of workflow applications on cloud typically involves a large number of virtual machines (VMs), which makes the cost as well as energy consumption a great concern. To alleviate this issue, more and more cloud service providers introduce new pricing policies considering Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), where users are charged on the basis of allocated CPU frequencies together with various combinations of VM configurations and prices. However, the customizable CPU frequencies make resource provisioning and scheduling harder to achieve a cost-optimal solution. The things become even worse, since lowering CPU voltages of VMs will increase their chance of suffering soft errors, which results in a high rate of completion time failures of workflow applications. To address the above problem, this paper proposes a novel task scheduling method for the purpose of cost optimization based on the genetic algorithm. By introducing new genetic operators and frequency scaling scheme for DVFS-enabled cloud workflows, our approach can quickly figure out cost-optimal resource provisioning and task scheduling solutions by allocating tasks to appropriate VMs with specific operating frequencies under energy, reliability, makespan and memory constraints. Extensive experiments on various well-known scientific workflow benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Comparing with state-of-the-art methods, our approach can significantly reduce the overall cost and energy consumption without violating the given constraints.

Optimizing computational costs of Spark for SARS‐CoV‐2 sequences comparisons on a commercial cloud

SummaryCloud computing is currently one of the prime choices in the computing infrastructure landscape. In addition to advantages such as the pay‐per‐use bill model and resource elasticity, there are technical benefits regarding heterogeneity and large‐scale configuration. Alongside the classical need for performance, for example, time, space, and energy, there is an interest in the financial cost that might come from budget constraints. Based on scalability considerations and the pricing model of traditional public clouds, a reasonable optimization strategy output could be the most suitable configuration of virtual machines to run a specific workload. From the perspective of runtime and monetary cost optimizations, we provide the adaptation of a Hadoop applications execution cost model extracted from the literature aiming at Spark applications modeled with the MapReduce paradigm. We evaluate our optimizer model executing an improved version of the Diff Sequences Spark application to perform SARS‐CoV‐2 coronavirus pairwise sequence comparisons using the AWS EC2's virtual machine instances. The experimental results with our model outperformed 80% of the random resource selection scenarios. By only employing spot worker nodes exposed to revocation scenarios rather than on‐demand workers, we obtained an average monetary cost reduction of 35.66% with a slight runtime increase of 3.36%.

Energy-Aware Live VM Migration Using Ballooning in Cloud Data Center

The demand for digitization has inspired organizations to move towards cloud computing, which has increased the challenge for cloud service providers to provide quality service. One of the challenges is energy consumption, which can shoot up the cost of using computing resources and has raised the carbon footprint in the atmosphere; therefore, it is an issue that it is imperative to address. Virtualization, bin-packing, and live VM migration techniques are the key resolvers that have been found to be efficacious in presenting sound solutions. Thus, in this paper, a new live VM migration algorithm, live migration with efficient ballooning (LMEB), is proposed; LMEB focuses on decreasing the size of the data that need to be shifted from the source to the destination server so that the total energy consumption of migration can be reduced. A simulation was performed with a specific configuration of virtual machines and servers, and the results proved that the proposed algorithm could trim down energy usage by 18%, migration time by 20%, and downtime by 20% in comparison with the existing approach of live migration with ballooning (LMB).

Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Latency Minimization for Mobile Edge Computing With Virtualization in Maritime UAV Communication Network

The rapid development of maritime activities has led to the emergence of more and more computation-intensive applications. In order to meet the huge demand for wireless communications in maritime environment, mobile edge computing (MEC) is considered as an effective solution to provide powerful computing capabilities for maritime terminals of resource scarcity or latency sensitive. A basic technology to implement MEC is virtual machine (VM) multiplexing, through which multi-task parallel computing on a server is realized. In this paper, a two-layer unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) maritime communication network with a centralized top-UAV (T-UAV) and a group of distributed bottom-UAVs (B-UAVs) is established and MEC is used on T-UAV. We aim to solve the latency minimization problem for both communication and computation in this maritime UAV swarm mobile edge computing network. We reformulate this problem into a Markov decision process (MDP), since it is a non-convex and multiply constrained but has the characteristics of MDP. Based on this MDP model, we take deep reinforcement learning (DRL) as our tool to propose a deep Q-network (DQN) and a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithms to optimize the trajectory of T-UAV and configuration of virtual machines (VMs). Using these two proposed algorithms, we can minimize the system latency. Simulation results show that the given solutions are valid and effective.

Research on fine tuning parameter insulator identification based on YOLOV4 algorithm

Aiming at the problem that the training network time of YOLOV4 algorithm is too long due to the large data set of aerial insulator images, a method based on YOLOV4 algorithm is proposed to shorten the training time by fine-tuning parameters without affecting the positioning detection accuracy. Based on the development of UBANTU virtual machine, through CUDA and CUDNN environment configuration, and through the detection and verification of insulator aerial photo data set, the feasibility of accurate positioning of insulators under the condition of fine tuning parameters of YOLOV4 algorithm is successfully proved.

Holistic VM Placement for Distributed Parallel Applications in Heterogeneous Clusters

In a heterogeneous cluster, virtual machine (VM) placement for a distributed parallel application is challenging due to numerous possible ways of placing the application and complexity of estimating the performance of the application. This study investigates a holistic VM placement technique for distributed parallel applications in a heterogeneous cluster, aiming to maximize the efficiency of the cluster and consequently reduce the costs for service providers and users. The proposed technique accommodates various factors that have an impact on performance in a combined manner. First, we analyze the effects of the heterogeneity of resources, different VM configurations, and interference between VMs on the performance of distributed parallel applications with a wide diversity of characteristics, including scientific and big data analytics applications. We then propose a placement technique that uses a machine learning algorithm to estimate the runtime of a distributed parallel application. To train a performance estimation model, a distributed parallel application is profiled against synthetic workloads that mostly utilize the dominant resource of the application, which strongly affects the application performance, reducing the profiling space dramatically. Through experimental and simulation studies, we show that the proposed placement technique can find good VM placement configurations for various workloads.

Computational comparison of common event-based differential splicing tools: practical considerations for laboratory researchers

BackgroundComputational tools analyzing RNA-sequencing data have boosted alternative splicing research by identifying and assessing differentially spliced genes. However, common alternative splicing analysis tools differ substantially in their statistical analyses and general performance. This report compares the computational performance (CPU utilization and RAM usage) of three event-level splicing tools; rMATS, MISO, and SUPPA2. Additionally, concordance between tool outputs was investigated.ResultsLog-linear relations were found between job times and dataset size in all splicing tools and all virtual machine (VM) configurations. MISO had the highest job times for all analyses, irrespective of VM size, while MISO analyses also exceeded maximum CPU utilization on all VM sizes. rMATS and SUPPA2 load averages were relatively low in both size and replicate comparisons, not nearing maximum CPU utilization in the VM simulating the lowest computational power (D2 VM). RAM usage in rMATS and SUPPA2 did not exceed 20% of maximum RAM in both size and replicate comparisons while MISO reached maximum RAM usage in D2 VM analyses for input size. Correlation coefficients of differential splicing analyses showed high correlation (β > 80%) between different tool outputs with the exception of comparisons of retained intron (RI) events between rMATS/MISO and rMATS/SUPPA2 (β < 60%).ConclusionsPrior to RNA-seq analyses, users should consider job time, amount of replicates and splice event type of interest to determine the optimal alternative splicing tool. In general, rMATS is superior to both MISO and SUPPA2 in computational performance. Analysis outputs show high concordance between tools, with the exception of RI events.

Guaranteed Bang for the Buck: Modeling VDI Applications to Identify Storage Requirements

In the cloud environment, most services are provided by virtual machines (VMs). Identifying storage requirements of VMs is challenging, but it is essential for good user experiences while optimizing use of storage resources. Determining the storage configuration necessary to support and satisfy VMs first requires an accurate description of the VM configurations, and the problem is further exacerbated by the diversity and special characteristics of the VMs. In this paper, we study Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), a prevalent and complicated VM application, to identify and characterize storage requirements of VMs and determine how to meet such requirements with minimal storage resources and cost. We first create a model to describe the behavior of VDI, and we collect real VDI traces to populate this model. The model allows us to identify the storage requirements of VDI and determine the potential bottlenecks of a given storage configuration. Based on this information, we can tell what capacity and minimum capability a storage configuration needs in order to support and satisfy given VDI configurations. We show that our model can describe more fine-grained VM behavior varying with time and virtual disk types compared with the rules of thumb currently used in industry.

Benchmarking and Performance Evaluations on Various Configurations of Virtual Machine and Containers for Cloud-Based Scientific Workloads

Cloud computing manages system resources such as processing, storage, and networking by providing users with multiple virtual machines (VMs) as needed. It is one of the rapidly growing fields that come with huge computational power for scientific workloads. Currently, the scientific community is ready to work over the cloud as it is considered as a resource-rich paradigm. The traditional way of executing scientific workloads on cloud computing is by using virtual machines. However, the latest emerging concept of containerization is growing more rapidly and gained popularity because of its unique features. Containers are treated as lightweight as compared to virtual machines in cloud computing. In this regard, a few VMs/containers-associated problems of performance and throughput are encountered because of middleware technologies such as virtualization or containerization. In this paper, we introduce the configurations of VMs and containers for cloud-based scientific workloads in order to utilize the technologies to solve scientific problems and handle their workloads. This paper also tackles throughput and efficiency problems related to VMs and containers in the cloud environment and explores efficient resource provisioning by combining four unique methods: hyperthreading (HT), vCPU cores selection, vCPU affinity, and isolation of vCPUs. The HEPSCPEC06 benchmark suite is used to evaluate the throughput and efficiency of VMs and containers. The proposed solution is to implement four basic techniques to reduce the effect of virtualization and containerization. Additionally, these techniques are used to make virtual machines and containers more effective and powerful for scientific workloads. The results show that allowing hyperthreading, isolation of CPU cores, proper numbering, and allocation of vCPU cores can improve the throughput and performance of virtual machines and containers.

Virtual machine allocation method for cloud computing based on multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

In order to overcome the problems of data access delay and high energy consumption in virtual machine configuration of cloud computing, a new virtual machine allocation method for cloud computing based on multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is proposed in this paper. Based on multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, the objective of energy consumption and access delay optimisation is replaced by an objective model, which is used as the allocation objective model of computational virtual machine. The ant colony algorithm and K-NN local search method are introduced to obtain the optimal solution of the allocation target model and realise the output of the optimal allocation scheme for cloud computing virtual machines. The experimental results show that the access delay and energy consumption of the proposed method are significantly lower than those of other methods, which proves that the proposed method has better performance.

Benchmarking Computational Performance of Virtual Machines Within the Secure Unified Research Environment Versus Physical Computers

IntroductionThe Secure Unified Research Environment (SURE) is a high-powered computing environment located within Sax Institute (Sydney, Australia). SURE was established through the financial support of the Australian Government National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) as part of the Population Health Research Network (PHRN). SURE is approved by the Australian Government as the only secure platform for analysing unit record level sensitive health and other Australian Government data, providing computational resources and secure infrastructure in a form of virtual machines (VMs) accessible by approved researchers in Australia and overseas.&#x0D; Objectives and ApproachWe aim to compare computational performance of SURE VMs of different configurations with the performance of physical computers by running a series of standardised computational tasks involving different numbers of central processingunit (CPU) cores available on each computer. The approach utilised the benchmark test maintained by the H2O.ai group (https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/). The results were measured over the datasets of different sizes, ranging from 500MB to 50GB in Random Access Memory (RAM).&#x0D; ResultsOur benchmarking outcomes have revealed that computational efficiency of physical computers uniformly outperform the efficiency of the current standard SURE VM configuration offerings, sometimes demonstrating a nearly double performance. For the range of typical analytical tasks assessed, computational performance greatly benefits from extending the number of computational cores available on a machine.&#x0D; Conclusion / ImplicationsSURE is a highly valuable tool enabling research and collaborations involving confidential population-based data. The shortage of RAM and CPU cores can be a major bottleneck even for moderately large datasets. VMs currently offered by SURE yet fall short of reaching computational performance of physical desktop computers. The results are to guide the funders and providers of secure remote access data laboratories responsible for providing Research Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) tailored to meet the needs of participating research groups.

Predicting QoS of virtual machines via Bayesian network with XGboost-induced classes

Quality of Service (QoS) of virtual machines (VMs) is guaranteed by the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) signed between users and service providers during the renting of VMs. A typical idea to ensure the SLAs being reached is to predict the QoS of VMs accurately and then take the appropriate measures according to the prediction results timely. However, the QoS is affected by multiple VM-related features, among which the uncertain and non-linear relationships are challenging to represent and analyze. Thus, in this paper, we construct a class parameter augmented Bayesian Network (CBN) to overcome the difficulties and then predict the QoS of VMs accurately. Specifically, we first cluster multiple VM-related features based on the Euclidean distance, and then use XGboost to classify the different VM configurations within each cluster. Then, we construct the CBN based on the classification results as well as the corresponding QoS values. Consequently, we predict the QoS of VMs via the variable elimination (VE) with CBN. Experimental results show the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed method on predicting the QoS of VMs.

Response Surface Modelling for Performance Analysis of Scientific Workflow Application in Cloud

Scientific workflow applications are used by scientists to carry out research in various domains such as Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy etc. These applications require huge computational resources and currently cloud platform is used for efficiently running these applications. To improve the makespan and cost in workflow execution in cloud platform it requires to identify proper number of Virtual Machines (VM) and choose proper VM type. As cloud platform is dynamic, the available resources and the type of the resources are the two important factors on the cost and makespan of workflow execution. The primary objective of this work is to analyze the relationship among the cloud configuration parameters (Number of VM, Type of VM, VM configurations) for executing scientific workflow applications in cloud platform. In this work, to accurately analyze the influence of cloud platform resource configuration and scheduling polices a new predictive modelling using Box–Behnken design which is one of the modelling technique of Response Surface Methodology (RSM). It is used to build quadratic mathematical models that can be used to analyze relationships among input and output variables. Workflow cost and makespan models were built for real world scientific workflows using ANOVA and it was observed that the models fit well and can be useful in analyzing the performance of scientific workflow applications in cloud

A hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm for scientific workflow scheduling in heterogeneous distributed computing systems

Cloud computing has attracted great attentions in research community because of its ubiquitous, unlimited computing resources, low cost, and flexibility owing to virtualization technology. This paper presents a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm to solve parallelizable scientific workflows on elastic cloud platforms since applying a single approach cannot yield optimal solution in such complicated problems. Scientific workflows are modeled in the form of directed acyclic graph (DAG) in which there exists data dependency between sub-tasks. In the cloud marketplace, each provider delivers variable virtual machine (VM) configurations which lead different performance. Generally, parallelizable task scheduling on parallel computing machines to obtain minimum total execution time, makespan, belongs to NP-Hard problem. To deal with the combinatorial problem, the hybrid discrete particle swarm optimization (HDPSO) algorithm is presented that has three main phases. At the first phase a random algorithm following by novel theorems is applied to produce swarm members; it is as input of presented new discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) algorithm in the second phase. To avoid getting stuck in sub-optimal trap and to balance between exploration and exploitation, local search improvement is randomly combined in DPSO by calling Hill Climbing technique at the third phase to enhance overall performance. Second and third phases are iterated till the termination criteria is met. The average results reported from different executions of intensive settings on 12 scientific datasets proved our hybrid meta-heuristic has the amount of 10.67, 14.48, and 3 percentage dominance in terms of SLR, SpeedUp, and efficiency respectively against other existing meta-heuristics.

Faster MapReduce Computation on Clouds Through Better Performance Estimation

Processing Big Data in cloud is on the increase. An important issue for efficient execution of Big Data processing jobs on a cloud platform is selecting the best fitting virtual machine (VM) configuration(s) among the miscellany of choices that cloud providers offer. Wise selection of VM configurations can lead to better performance, cost and energy consumption. Therefore, it is crucial to explore the available configurations and opt for the best ones that well suit each MapReduce application. Profiling the given application on all the configurations is costly, time and energy consuming. An alternative is to run the application on a subset of configurations (sample configurations) and estimate its performance on other configurations based on the obtained values by sample configurations. We show that the choice of these sample configurations highly affects accuracy of later estimations. Our Smart Configuration Selection (SCS) scheme chooses better representatives from among all configurations by once-off analysis of given performance figures of the benchmarks so as to increase the accuracy of estimations of missing values, and consequently, to more accurately choose the configuration providing the highest performance. The results show that the SCS choice of sample configurations is very close to the best choice, and can reduce estimation error to 11.58 percent from the original 19.72 percent of random configuration selection. More importantly, using SCS estimations in a makespan minimization algorithm improves the execution time by up to 36.03 percent compared with random sample selection.

A QoS ranking and controlling framework in virtualised clouds

In cloud computing, quality of service (QoS) has become an important issue either from the perspective of cloud providers or users. In this paper, we present a lightweight framework, namely cloud QoS ranking and controlling (CQRC), which integrates a QoS ranking service and a fine-grained QoS controller. The QoS ranking service provides an effective approach to quickly evaluating the QoS level of any cloud resources or services based on historical performances; the QoS controller is designed by using feedback control technique and is capable of self-tuning the underlying virtual machine (VM) configurations. The proposed framework is implemented and evaluated in a real-world cloud platform through a set of experiments and the results indicate that its QoS ranking service can significantly reduce the frequency of QoS violations and the QoS controller can achieve better tradeoffs between performance and cost for cloud providers.

A Game Theoretic Approach to Estimate Fair Cost of VM Placement in Cloud Data Center

Pricing of virtual machines (VMs) with different dimensions is a challenging task. VM pricing involves both capital and operational expenditures. Capital expenditure is fixed in nature, while operational expenditure is variable. A fraction of capital expenditure is included for VM pricing. An individual pays the cloud service provider (CSP) for his requested VM. If the users cooperate among themselves they may end up paying less to CSP for their requested VMs vis-a-vis they would have paid had they requested individually. In this paper, an n -person cooperative game is adopted to determine the price that users would pay for their requested VMs under a cooperative environment. Shapley value is used to estimate the fraction of capital expenditure that would be included in the VM price. An integer linear programming is proposed for energy-efficient placement. For evaluation, VM configurations and pricing of popular CSPs—Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2—are considered. Results show that users would pay less for their requested VMs if they cooperate. The energy consumed by the proposed VM placement technique is compared with first fit decreasing (FFD) and enhanced first fit decreasing (EFFD). It is observed that the proposed technique consumes lesser energy compared to FFD and EFFD.

A novel energy efficient virtual machine configuration and migration technique

The recent growth in the data centre usage and the higher cost of managing virtual machines clearly demands focused research in reducing the cost of managing and migrating virtual machines. The cost of virtual machine management majorly includes the energy cost, thus the best available virtual machine management and migration techniques must have the lowest energy consumption. The management of virtual machine is solely dependent on the number of applications running on that virtual machine, where there is a very little scope for researchers to improve the energy. The second parameter is migration in order to balance the load, where a number of researches are been carried out to reduce the energy consumption. This work addresses the issue of energy consumption during virtual machine migration and proposes a novel virtual machine migration technique with improvement of energy consumption. The novel algorithm is been proposed in two enhancements as VM selection and VM migration, which demonstrates over 47% reduction in energy consumption.

On the Carbon Footprint Optimization in an InterCloud Environment

In this paper, we address the problem of Virtual Machine (VM) placement in an InterCloud with regard to the reduction of carbon footprint in such computing environment. In order to minimize data centers’ Greenhouse Gas (GhG) emissions, this paper proposes a mathematical formulation, where the placement approach is stated as a Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem which aims at minimizing the carbon footprint of the InterCloud. The proposed formulation presents an accurate carbon footprint evaluation based on joint optimization techniques, such as smart and performance-aware workload consolidation, along with cooling efficiency maximization, while considering the greenness factor of the data centers and the dynamic behavior of the equipment cooling fans. Simulations with an exact method showed that, compared with other baseline approaches, the proposed mathematical model leads to optimal configurations with minimal GhG emissions in a single cloud, as well as in an InterCloud environment, and can yield savings of up to 65 percent. The proposed model has also been compared with an approach that performs blind VM consolidation, and the obtained results showed that such model can simultaneously lead to VM configuration that yields the minimum carbon footprint while performing smart VM consolidation in order to prevent Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations.