Hardness of Approximation and Greedy Algorithms for the Adaptation Problem in Virtual Environments

— Over the past decade, wide-area distributed computing has emerged as a powerful computing paradigm. Virtual machines greatly simplify wide-area distributed computing ing the abstraction to benefit both resource users and providers. A virtual execution environment consisting of virtual machines (VMs) interconnected with virtual networks provides opportunities to dynamically optimize, at run-time, the performance of existing, unmodified distributed applications without any user or programmer intervention. We have formalized the adaptation problem in virtual execution environments, and shown that it is NP-hard to both, solve and approximate within a factor of m1/2−δ for any δ > 0, where m is the number of edges in the virtual overlay graph. We also designed and evaluated greedy adaptation algorithms and found them to work well in practice.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICAC
• Authors: Ananth I. Sundararaj, Manan Sanghi, John R. Lange, Peter A. Dinda
• Keywords: Autonomic Computing, ICAC 2006, Virtual Execution Environments, Virtual Machines, Wide-area Distributed Computing