Workload Migration Research Articles

Survey of fault management techniques for edge-enabled distributed metaverse applications

The metaverse, envisioned as a vast, distributed virtual world, relies on edge computing for low-latency data processing. However, ensuring fault tolerance – the system’s ability to handle failures – is critical for a seamless user experience. This paper analyzes existing research on fault tolerance in edge computing over the past six years, specifically focusing on its applicability to the metaverse. We identify common fault types like node failures, communication disruptions, and security issues. The analysis then explores various fault management techniques including proactive monitoring, resource optimization, task scheduling, workload migration, redundancy for service continuity, machine learning for predictive maintenance, and consensus algorithms to guarantee data integrity. While these techniques hold promise, adaptations are necessary to address the metaverse’s real-time interaction requirements and low-latency constraints. This paper analyzes existing research and identifies key areas for improvement, providing valuable research guidelines and insights to pave the way for the development of fault management techniques specifically tailored to the metaverse, ultimately contributing to a robust and secure virtual world.

Compiler-Driven FPGA Virtualization with SYNERGY

FPGAs are increasingly common in modern applications, and cloud providers now support on-demand FPGA acceleration in datacenters. Applications in datacenters run on virtual infrastructure, where consolidation, multi-tenancy, and workload migration enable economies of scale that are fundamental to the provider's business. However, a general strategy for virtualizing FPGAs has yet to emerge. While manufacturers struggle with hardware-based approaches, we propose a compiler/runtime-based solution called Synergy. We show a compiler transformation for Verilog programs that produces code able to yield control to software atsub-clock-tickgranularity according to the semantics of the original program. Synergy uses this property to efficiently support core virtualization primitives: suspend and resume, program migration, and spatial/temporal multiplexing, on hardware which is availabletoday.We use Synergy to virtualize FPGA workloads across a cluster of Intel SoCs and Xilinx FPGAs on Amazon F1. The workloads require no modification, run within 3--4x of unvirtualized performance, and incur a modest increase in FPGA fabric usage.

Ensuring Fairness in Edge Networks: A GNN-Based Media Workload Migration Scheme With Fairness Guarantee

Ensuring Fairness in Edge Networks: A GNN-Based Media Workload Migration Scheme With Fairness Guarantee

Implementing Virtualization on Single-Board Computers: A Case Study on Edge Computing

The widespread adoption of cloud computing has resulted in centralized datacenter structures; however, there is a requirement for smaller-scale distributed infrastructures to meet the demands for speed, responsiveness, and security for critical applications. Single-Board Computers (SBCs) present numerous advantages such as low power consumption, low cost, minimal heat emission, and high processing power, making them suitable for applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT), experimentation, and other advanced projects. This paper investigates the possibility of adopting virtualization technology on Single-Board Computers (SBCs) for the implementation of reliable and cost-efficient edge-computing environments.The results of this study are based on experimental implementations and testing conducted in the course of a case study performed on the edge infrastructure of a financial organization, where workload migration was achieved from a traditional to an SBC-based edge infrastructure. The performance of the two infrastructures was studied and compared during this process, providing important insights into the power efficiency gains, resource utilization, and overall suitability for the organization’s operational needs.

Balancing Power Grids and Maximizing Revenue: A Novel Approach to Rebate Auctions for Cloud Workload Migrations

Balancing Power Grids and Maximizing Revenue: A Novel Approach to Rebate Auctions for Cloud Workload Migrations

Backup Battery Allocation and Workload Migration Against Electrical Load Shedding at Edge

In the 5G era (and the upcoming 6G), Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been advocated to serve the massive amount of Internet of Things (IoT) devices by base stations (BSs) and edge data centers (EDCs). Geo-distributed EDCs are generally of much smaller scales as compared to mega DCs and hence of much lower costs, but can have fast response to their users so as to satisfy the demands of real-time applications. As their reliability and availability heavily depend on the electrical power supply, most EDCs are equipped with battery groups as backup power in case of power grid load shedding or outage. In a heterogeneous geo-distributed environment, the QoS of heavily loaded EDCs however can be severely impacted by limited backup power while lightly loaded EDCs may simply waste such precious resources. Moreover, a heavily loaded EDC may suffer from deep discharge of its battery group, which will cause a significant reduction of battery capacity and lifetime. This further aggravates the aforementioned situations should load shedding/outage happen again. In this paper, we carefully analyze the workloads in EDCs and classify them into interactive workloads and batch workloads, respectively. We then develop a novel battery allocation framework with smart workload migration for EDCs, which simultaneously protects interactive workloads from being interrupted and minimizes the waiting time of batch workloads. Our extensive evaluations show that our strategies can optimize all the objectives within a limited overall cost as compared to state-of-the-art practical allocation.

Geo-Distributed Multi-Tier Workload Migration Over Multi-Timescale Electricity Markets

Geo-Distributed Multi-Tier Workload Migration Over Multi-Timescale Electricity Markets

Joint task offloading and resource allocation for multi-user and multi-server MEC networks: A deep reinforcement learning approach with multi-branch architecture

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising computing paradigm in the context of 5G networks, as it enables the migration of workloads from User Equipments (UEs) to nearby MEC servers, thereby providing additional computing resources to UEs. In this paper, we propose a joint optimization approach to offloading decisions and resource allocation in a multi-user and multi-server MEC system, which operates in a time-varying environment. Our objective is to minimize the average task latency and discard rate under the constraints of latency and limited computing resources of the server. While traditional optimization methods have been used to solve computational offloading problems in static environments, these methods are not suitable for time-varying systems. Deep reinforcement learning can be an effective method for solving optimization problems in time-varying environments, as it can be used to adjust strategies in real-time in response to changes in the environment. However, the increased number of UEs in the system leads to a combinatorial increase in the number of possible actions, making it difficult for the algorithm to learn. To address this issue, we propose a multi-branch network based Deep Q Network (DQN) algorithm called Branch Deep Q Network (BDQN), which modifies the action generation network into a multi-branch network structure, each branch generates one-dimensional action. This modification makes the number of network outputs increase linearly. Numerical results show that the BDQN algorithm outperforms other baseline algorithms in terms of average task latency and discard rate.

Carbon Management of Multi-Datacenter Based On Spatio-Temporal Task Migration

With the massive deployment of geographically distributed data centers (DCs) and the demand surge for cloud services, their high energy consumption and carbon pollution are increasingly problematic. Therefore, mitigating the harmful effects of the carbon footprint of DCs has become a critical challenge. This paper takes the first step toward analyzing the complementary characteristics of global multi-regional renewable energy sources (RES). There is an opportunity to schedule workloads flexibly and track RES to reduce emissions. Integrating DCs and inter-DC network to form a refined emission model for the trade-off between emission cutting effects from scheduling and carbon costs of workload migration, we propose the spatio-temporal task migration mechanism to pursue low carbon in dual-dimension: This paper shifts intensive workloads to locations sufficient in RES at a coarse scale, and adjust the execution time of the workload in response to real-time RES fluctuations at a fine scale. Thus, the emission overage is shifted and offset by RES in a complementary manner; meanwhile, the acceptance of RES is enhanced. Finally, experiments with real-world data show that our method can optimally coordinate demand with RES and mitigate carbon pollution in geographically distributed DCs, and verify the performance and applicability with various-parameter scenarios.

Moving-Target Defense in Depth: Pervasive Self- and Situation-Aware VM Mobilization across Federated Clouds in Presence of Active Attacks

Federated clouds are interconnected cooperative cloud infrastructures offering vast hosting capabilities, smooth workload migration and enhanced reliability. However, recent devastating attacks on such clouds have shown that such features come with serious security challenges. The oblivious heterogeneous construction, management, and policies employed in federated clouds open the door for attackers to induce conflicts to facilitate pervasive coordinated attacks. In this paper, we present a novel proactive defense that aims to increase attacker uncertainty and complicate target tracking, a critical step for successful coordinated attacks. The presented systemic approach acts as a VM management platform with an intrinsic multidimensional hierarchical attack representation model (HARM) guiding a dynamic, self and situation-aware VM live-migration for moving-target defense (MtD). The proposed system managed to achieve the proposed goals in a resource-, energy-, and cost-efficient manner.

Server Deployment and Load Balancing in Stochastic Mobile Edge Computing Networks

This letter investigates the server deployment for a randomly deployed mobile edge computing (MEC) network. Under a given density of users, the theoretical analysis shows that there exists an optimal deployment density of MEC servers to maximize the network-wide resource utilization, and the optimum can be determined by bisection searching. In the analysis, a modified gamma distribution is introduced to deal with the inaccurate approximation of the existing methods. Moreover, we propose a workload migration scheme to tackle load imbalance and improve network resource utilization. Numerical simulations verify the analytical results and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme.

Rebate Auction Mechanisms for Bidirectional Grid Balancing Using Cloud Workload Migrations

Increasing the power-grid’s flexibility is essential for expanding the integration of renewable energy sources in modern power grids. This work presents a new rebate auction framework that allows power grids to use cloud datacenters as managed loads to provide upward/downward grid flexibility. Since the energy consumption of datacenters is proportional to their computational workload, this paper presents a rebate auction framework that can induce cloud workload migrations between datacenters to correct energy imbalances. Unlike existing datacenter-based power grid balancing approaches that have only focused on providing downward flexibility and only considered owner-operated datacenters, the proposed framework provides bidirectional flexibility and accommodates both owner-operated and public cloud datacenters. Thus, providing a general framework for creating workload migrations between datacenters to balance the power grid. Because workloads on public cloud datacenters are managed by end-users, the proposed framework uses monetary incentives (auctioned rebates) to encourage large-scale end-users to migrate their cloud workloads between datacenters to correct energy imbalances. The use of monetary rewards as an incentive hides the complexity of grid-balancing from auction participants, who only participate in the auction to lower their cost, while grid-balancing happens as a result of workload migrations. This paper presents and compares two auction implementations under the proposed framework, a strategy-proof implementation that guarantees truthful bidding as a dominant strategy, but has NP-hard computational complexity, and an alternative implementation that does not guarantee truthful bidding, but has polynomial time complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed framework is effective in incentivizing cloud workload migrations to achieve the grid balancing goal and provides positive utility to all participants.

ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ ВИКОРИСТАННЯ ХМАРНИХ ТЕХНОЛОГІЙ ДЛЯ ЦИФРОВИХ БАНКІВ

This article examines the current state of cloud solution adoption across banking industry. While the advantages of using cloud are clear, this process introduces new challenges and risks. Considering security as the most important obstacle to cloud adoption for bank institutions, it's highlighted the specific of operation cloud models more suitable to meet the needs of digital banks. The reasons for migration of core workloads to the cloud are also outlined. It reflects the increasing impact of cloud technology on the modern business models across banking industry in the new digital economy.

An open source and practical approach to X2X linux workload migration

An open source and practical approach to X2X linux workload migration

Multi-Layer Latency Aware Workload Assignment of E-Transport IoT Applications in Mobile Sensors Cloudlet Cloud Networks

These days, with the emerging developments in wireless communication technologies, such as 6G and 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, the usage of E-Transport applications has been increasing progressively. These applications are E-Bus, E-Taxi, self-autonomous car, E-Train and E-Ambulance, and latency-sensitive workloads executed in the distributed cloud network. Nonetheless, many delays present in cloudlet-based cloud networks, such as communication delay, round-trip delay and migration during the workload in the cloudlet-based cloud network. However, the distributed execution of workloads at different computing nodes during the assignment is a challenging task. This paper proposes a novel Multi-layer Latency (e.g., communication delay, round-trip delay and migration delay) Aware Workload Assignment Strategy (MLAWAS) to allocate the workload of E-Transport applications into optimal computing nodes. MLAWAS consists of different components, such as the Q-Learning aware assignment and the Iterative method, which distribute workload in a dynamic environment where runtime changes of overloading and overheating remain controlled. The migration of workload and VM migration are also part of MLAWAS. The goal is to minimize the average response time of applications. Simulation results demonstrate that MLAWAS earns the minimum average response time as compared with the two other existing strategies.

IoTSim-Osmosis: A framework for modeling and simulating IoT applications over an edge-cloud continuum

The osmotic computing paradigm sets out the principles and algorithms for simplifying the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) applications in integrated edge-cloud environments. Various existing simulation frameworks can be used to support integration of cloud and edge computing environments. However, none of these can directly support an osmotic computing environment due to the complexity of IoT applications and heterogeneity of integrated edge-cloud environments. Osmotic computing suggests the migration of workload to/from a cloud data center to edge devices, based on performance and security trigger events. We propose ‘IoTSim-Osmosis– a simulation framework to support the testing and validation of osmotic computing applications. In particular, our detailed related work analysis demonstrates that IoTSim-Osmosis is the first simulation framework to enable unified modeling and simulation of complex IoT applications over heterogeneous edge-cloud environments. IoTSim-Osmosis is demonstrated using an electricity management and billing application case study, for benchmarking various run-time QoS parameters, such as IoT battery use, execution time, network transmission time and consumed energy.

Smart workload migration on external cloud service providers to minimize delay, running time, and transfer cost

SummaryWith limited resources, overutilization is a challenging issue in the emerging system of smart devices, resulting in higher costs, poor performance and low prices due to service level agreement (SLA) violations. These factors extremely annoy the customers as well as providers. External resources are hired to overcome the resources scalability challenges; however, external resources cause higher delay, running time, and transfer cost. The lift in delay explicitly means more cost and more customers dissatisfaction. The delay and transfer cost increases with geographical distance and overutilization. In this article, a mechanism is proposed to make efficient migration decisions to external cloud service providers (CSPs) to minimize the delay, running time, and transfer cost by searching an optimum data center (DC), where the resources may be taken with optimum conditions. The Cloud Analyst is extended to simulate the proposed framework. Results were calculated for three different phenomena, where hiring the resources from underutilized DC decreases the running time to 0.237 ms; however, the response time and transfer cost increases to 499 ms and 0.228 $, respectively; similarly, getting the resources of nearest DC drops the delay time and transfer cost to 80 ms and 0.065 $ respectively; however, the execution time increases to 0.500 ms. The proposed framework optimized the delay time, execution time and transfer cost to 50 ms, 0.237 ms, and 0.065 $, respectively.

Mitigating Curtailment and Carbon Emissions through Load Migration between Data Centers

Summary As the share of variable renewable energy (VRE) grows in the electric grid, so does the risk of curtailment. While energy storage and hydrogen production have been proposed as solutions to the curtailment problem, they often pose technological and economic challenges. Here, we analyze the potential of data center load migration for mitigating curtailment and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Using historical hourly electricity generation, curtailment, and typical data center server utilization data, we simulate the effect of migrating data center workloads from the fossil-fuel-heavy PJM to the renewable-heavy CAISO. The results show that load migration within the existing data center capacity during the curtailment hours in CAISO has the potential to reduce 113–239 KtCO2e per year of GHG emissions and absorb up to 62% of the total curtailment with negative abatement costs in 2019. Our study demonstrates the overlooked role that data centers can play for VRE integration and GHG emissions mitigation.

Disrupting Healthcare Silos: Addressing Data Volume, Velocity and Variety With a Cloud-Native Healthcare Data Ingestion Service

Healthcare enterprises are starting to adopt cloud computing due to its numerous advantages over traditional infrastructures. This has become a necessity because of the increased volume, velocity and variety of healthcare data, and the need to facilitate data correlation and large-scale analysis. Cloud computing infrastructures have the power to offer continuous acquisition of data from multiple heterogeneous sources, efficient data integration, and big data analysis. At the same time, security, availability, and disaster recovery are critical factors aiding towards the adoption of cloud computing. However, the migration of healthcare workloads to cloud is not straightforward due to the vagueness in healthcare data standards, heterogeneity and sensitive nature of healthcare data, and many regulations that govern its usage. This paper highlights the need for providing healthcare data acquisition using cloud infrastructures and presents the challenges, requirements, use-cases, and best practices for building a state-of-the-art healthcare data ingestion service on cloud.

Online Resource Management for Improving Reliability of Real-Time Systems on “Big–Little” Type MPSoCs

Heterogeneous multiprocessor systems on a chips (MPSoCs) consisting of cores with different performance/power characteristics are widely used in many real-time embedded systems, where both soft-error reliability and lifetime reliability are key concerns. Although existing efforts have investigated related problems, they either focus on one of the two reliability concerns or propose time-consuming scheduling algorithms that cannot adequately address runtime workload and environmental variations. This paper introduces an online framework which is adaptive to runtime variations and maximizes soft-error reliability while satisfying the lifetime reliability constraint for soft real-time systems executing on MPSoCs that are composed of high-performance cores and low-power (LP) cores. Based on each core’s executing frequency and utilization, the framework performs workload migration between high-performance cores and LP cores to reduce power consumption and improve soft-error reliability. Experimental results based on different hardware platforms show that the proposed approach reduces the probability of failures due to soft errors by at least 17% and 50% on average compared to a number of representative existing approaches that satisfy the same lifetime reliability constraints.