Cloud resource provisioning: survey, status and future research directions

A systematic review on effective energy utilization management strategies in cloud data centers

Data centers are becoming considerably more significant and energy-intensive due to the exponential growth of cloud computing. Cloud computing allows people to access computer resources on demand. It provides amenities on the pay-as-you-go basis across the data center locations spread over the world. Consequently, cloud data centers consume a lot of electricity and leave a proportional carbon impact on the environment. There is a need to investigate efficient energy-saving approaches to reduce the massive energy usage in cloud servers. This review paper focuses on identifying the research done in the field of energy consumption (EC) using different techniques of machine learning, heuristics, metaheuristics, and statistical methods. Host CPU utilization prediction, underload/overload detection, virtual machine selection, migration, and placement have been performed to manage the resources and achieve efficient energy utilization. In this review, energy savings achieved by different techniques are compared. Many researchers have tried various methods to reduce energy usage and service level agreement violations (SLAV) in cloud data centers. By using the heuristic approach, researchers have saved 5.4% to 90% of energy with their proposed methods compared with the existing methods. Similarly, the metaheuristic approaches reduce energy consumption from 7.68% to 97%, the machine learning methods from 1.6% to 88.5%, and the statistical methods from 5.4% to 84% when compared to the benchmark approaches for a variety of settings and parameters. So, making energy use more efficient could cut down the air pollution, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and even the amount of water needed to make power. The overall outcome of this review work is to understand different methods used by researchers to save energy in cloud data centers.

Heuristic Resource Reservation Policies for Public Clouds in the IoT Era

With the advances in the IoT era, the number of wireless sensor devices has been growing rapidly. This increasing number gives rise to more complex networks where more complex tasks can be executed by utilizing more computational resources from the public clouds. Cloud service providers use various pricing models for their offered services. Some models are appropriate for the cloud service user's short-term requirements whereas the other models are appropriate for the long-term requirements of cloud service users. Reservation-based price models are suitable for long-term requirements of cloud service users. We used the pricing schemes with spot and reserved instances. Reserved instances support a hybrid cost model with fixed reservation costs that vary with contract duration and an hourly usage charge which is lower than the charge of the spot instances. Optimizing resources to be reserved requires sufficient research effort. Recent algorithms proposed for this problem are generally based on integer programming problems, so they do not have polynomial time complexity. In this work, heuristic-based polynomial time policies are proposed for this problem. It is exhibited that the cost for the cloud service user which uses our approach is comparable to optimal solutions, i.e., it is near-optimal.

Solving Task Scheduling Problem in the Cloud Using a Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

Synergistic confluence of pervasive sensing, computing, and networking is generating heterogeneous data at unprecedented scale and complexity. Cloud computing has emergered in the last two decades as a unique storage and computing resource to support a diverse assortment of applications. Numerous organizations are migrating to the cloud to store and process their information. When the cloud infrastructures and resources are insufficient to satisfy end-users requests, scheduling mechanisms are required. Task scheduling, especially in a distributed and heterogeneous system is an NP-hard problem since various task parameters must be considered for an appropriate scheduling. In this paper we propose a hybrid PSO and extremal optimization-based approach to resolve task scheduling in the cloud. The algorithm optimizes makespan which is an important criterion to schedule a number of tasks on different Virtual Machines. Experiments on synthetic and real-life workloads show the capability of the method to successfully schedule task and outperforms many known methods of the state of the art.

Research on Ultrasonic Image Recognition Based on Optimization Immune Algorithm

With the rapid development of science and technology, ultrasound has been paid more and more attention by people, and it is widely used in engineering, diagnosis, and detection. In this paper, an ultrasonic image recognition method based on immune algorithm is proposed for ultrasonic images, and its method is applied to medical ultrasound liver image recognition. Firstly, this paper grays out the ultrasound liver image and selects the region of interest of the image. Secondly, it extracts the feature based on spatial gray matrix independent matrix, spatial frequency decomposition, and fractal features. Then, the immune algorithm is used to classify and identify the normal liver, liver cirrhosis, and liver cancer ultrasound images. Finally, based on the deficiency of the immune algorithm, it is combined with the support vector machine to form an optimized immune algorithm, which improves the performance of ultrasonic liver image classification and recognition. The simulation shows that this paper can effectively classify the normal liver, liver cirrhosis, and liver cancer ultrasound images. Compared with the traditional immune algorithm, this paper combines the immune algorithm with the support vector machine, and the optimized immune algorithm can effectively improve the performance of ultrasonic liver image classification and recognition.

An Osmosis-Based Intelligent Agent Scheduling Framework for Cloud Bursting in a Hybrid Cloud

An intelligent system to efficiently provision resources in a hybrid cloud environment is necessary due to the high level of complexity. The semi-permeable agent for hybrid cloud scheduling (SPAH) is a bio-inspired agent that adapts the biological process of osmosis into cloud bursting. The primary objective of the agent is to minimize the makespan. The framework and algorithm for the two phases of SPAH, to recognize the state and decide on action are presented. A QoS (Quality of Service) deadline factor metric is proposed to study the indirect impact of SPAH in deadline satisfaction. SPAH shows significant improvement in deadline satisfaction of up to 85% as compared to other cloud bursting techniques. This is the result of a reduced makespan and a reduced cumulative waiting time. The analysis of SPAH shows that it works in quadratic time complexity.

Simulating Resource Management across the Cloud-to-Thing Continuum: A Survey and Future Directions

In recent years, there has been significant advancement in resource management mechanisms for cloud computing infrastructure performance in terms of cost, quality of service (QoS) and energy consumption. The emergence of the Internet of Things has led to the development of infrastructure that extends beyond centralised data centers from the cloud to the edge, the so-called cloud-to-thing continuum (C2T). This infrastructure is characterised by extreme heterogeneity, geographic distribution, and complexity, where the key performance indicators (KPIs) for the traditional model of cloud computing may no longer apply in the same way. Existing resource management mechanisms may not be suitable for such complex environments and therefore require thorough testing, validation and evaluation before even being considered for live system implementation. Similarly, previously discounted resource management proposals may be more relevant and worthy of revisiting. Simulation is a widely used technique in the development and evaluation of resource management mechanisms for cloud computing but is a relatively nascent research area for new C2T computing paradigms such as fog and edge computing. We present a methodical literature analysis of C2T resource management research using simulation software tools to assist researchers in identifying suitable methods, algorithms, and simulation approaches for future research. We analyse 35 research articles from a total collection of 317 journal articles published from January 2009 to March 2019. We present our descriptive and synthetic analysis from a variety of perspectives including resource management, C2T layer, and simulation.

Community-based replica management in distributed systems

Purpose

One of the techniques for improving the performance of distributed systems is data replication, wherein new replicas are created to provide more accessibility, fault tolerance and lower access cost of the data. In this paper, the authors propose a community-based solution for the management of data replication, based on the graph model of communication latency between computing and storage nodes. Communities are the clusters of nodes that the communication latency between the nodes are minimum values. The purpose of this study if to, by using this method, minimize the latency and access cost of the data.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper used the Louvain algorithm for finding the best communities. In the proposed algorithm, by requesting a file according to the nodes of each community, the cost of accessing the file located out of the applicant’s community was calculated and the results were accumulated. On exceeding the accumulated costs from a specified threshold, a new replica of the file was created in the applicant’s community. Besides, the number of replicas of each file should be limited to prevent the system from creating useless and redundant data.

Findings

To evaluate the method, four metrics were introduced and measured, including communication latency, response time, data access cost and data redundancy. The results indicated acceptable improvement in all of them.

Originality/value

So far, this is the first research that aims at managing the replicas via community detection algorithms. It opens many opportunities for further studies in this area.