An Architecture to Stimulate Behavioral Development of Academic Cloud Users

Kecskeméti, Gábor and Ostermann, Simon and Prodan, Radu (2013) An Architecture to Stimulate Behavioral Development of Academic Cloud Users. Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems, 2014 (2). pp. 136-150. ISSN 2210-5379 (In Press)

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Abstract

Academic cloud infrastructures are constructed and maintained so they minimally constrain their users. Since they are free and do not limit usage patterns, academics developed such behavior that jeopardizes fair and flexible resource provisioning. For efficiency, related work either explicitly limits user access to resources, or introduce automatic rationing techniques. Surprisingly, the root cause (i.e., the user behavior) is disregarded by these approaches. This article compares academic cloud user behavior to its commercial equivalent. We deduce, that academics should behave like commercial cloud users to relieve resource provisioning. To encourage commercial like behavior, we propose an architectural extension to existing academic infrastructure clouds. First, every user's energy consumption and efficiency is monitored. Then, energy efficiency based leader boards are used to ignite competition between academics and reveal their worst practices. Leader boards are not sufficient to completely change user behavior. Thus, we introduce engaging options that encourage academics to delay resource requests and prefer resources more suitable for the infrastructure's internal provisioning. Finally, we evaluate our extensions via a simulation using real life academic resource request traces. We show a potential resource utilization reduction (by the factor of at most 2.6) while maintaining the unlimited nature of academic clouds.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Energy Awareness, Pricing, Cloud Computing, Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS, Academic clouds
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics and Computer Science > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science / számítástechnika, számítógéptudomány
Divisions: Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems
Depositing User: Gábor Kecskeméti
Date Deposited: 18 Apr 2014 07:10
Last Modified: 26 May 2014 09:37
URI: https://eprints.sztaki.hu/id/eprint/7792

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