Improving Utilization of Infrastructure Clouds

— A key advantage of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds is providing users on-demand access to resources. However, to provide on-demand access, cloud providers must either significantly overprovision their infrastructure (and pay a high price for operating resources with low utilization) or reject a large proportion of user requests (in which case the access is no longer on-demand). At the same time, not all users require truly on-demand access to resources. Many applications and workflows are designed for recoverable systems where interruptions in service are expected. For instance, many scientists utilize High Throughput Computing (HTC)-enabled resources, such as Condor, where jobs are dispatched to available resources and terminated when the resource is no longer available. We propose a cloud infrastructure that combines on-demand allocation of resources with opportunistic provisioning of cycles from idle cloud nodes to other processes by deploying backfill Virtual Machines...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: Paul Marshall, Kate Keahey, Timothy Freeman
• Keywords: CCGRID 2011, Cloud, Distributed And Parallel Computing, On-demand Access, Resources