IEEE CLOUD 2010 Conference, Day 3

Interesting presentations from Day 3:

FlexPRICE: Flexible Provisioning of Resources in a Cloud Environment (CLOUD2010-3011) Thomas A. Henzinger, Anmol V. Singh, Vasu Singh, Thomas Wies, and Damien Zufferey(IST Austria A-3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria)
This talk was about running applications on EC2, where the user needs to decide number of CPUs, memory etc. How can they decide what they need and what is the best for their apps? FlexPRICE enables users to submit jobs to the cloud, and providers a number of suggestions for when and how to schedule the job. A job is presented as a data flow diagram with nodes as tasks and attributes such as input data, duration of job, memory required, executable file to run. As one of the questioners said at the end of this presentation, there is no clear notion of jobs in the cloud, so this work is more useful for the grid.

Workload Migration into Clouds – Challenges, Experiences, Opportunities (CLOUD2010-3020)
C. Ward, N. Aravamudan, K. Bhattacharya, K. Cheng, R. Filepp, R. Kearney, B. Peterson, L. Shwartz, and C.C. Young(B. Peterson, L. Shwartz, C. C. Young (IBM, USA)
Presented IBM’s Darwin framework, which is an integrated framework to assist application migration to the cloud.

Towards Self-Assisted Troubleshooting for the Deployment of Private Clouds (CLOUD2010-3021) Michael R. Head, Anca Sailer, Hidayatullah Shaikh, and Dennis Shea (IBM T. J. Watson, USA)
About the management of VM images in private clouds, where they can detect faults early during deployment if VM images are corrupted. This technique is based on taking snapshots of the images and using checkpoints to recover from failures.

Panel 2: Trends of Services and Cloud Computing
This panel included Andrzej Goscinski (School of IT, Deakin University Australia), Hemant K. Jain (Tata Consulting Services Professor, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee) and Min Lou (IBM). Each panellist gave a 15-minute presentation on their thoughts about trends in cloud computing. I don’t think anything new was said here, the usual comparisons of electricity and commuting as a utility were brought up.

An Architecture for a Mashup Container in Virtualized Environments (CLOUD2010-3049)
Michele Stecca and Massimo Maresca(DIST University of Genova; DEI University of Padova, Italy)
A reference model for event driven composite services or mash-ups. Based on the idea that a resource can be monitored and users can be notified when something interesting happens.

Mining Twitter in the Cloud: A Case Study (CLOUD2010-3014)
Pieter Noordhuis, Michiel Heijkoop, and Alexander Lazovik (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
An interesting talk about how to use EC2 to create social graph from twitter that has 50 million nodes and 1.8 billion edges, not too sure if I understood the motivations for doing this work but nonetheless it was an interesting case study. Their main finding was that you should create customized and basic analysis services yourself and deploy them on EC2 instances, and not use AWS’s SQS or SimpleDB as they would be expensive.

Cloud Computing: A Digital Libraries Perspective (CLOUD2010-3015)
Pradeep Teregowda, Bhuvan Urgaonkar, and C. Lee Giles (Pennsylvania State University, USA)
An interesting case study of the feasibility of migrating CiteSeerX (which is deployed on physical 22 servers) from their in-house data centre to Amazon EC2 to take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity but also to free them from hardware maintenance so they can focus on software improvements.

A Lifetime Supporting Framework for Cloud Applications (CLOUD2010-3046)
Shigeru Hosono, He Huang, Tatsunori Hara, Yoshiki Shimomura, and Tamio Arai(NEC Corporation, Japan; NEC Advanced Software Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd., China; The University of Tokyo; Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan)
A suite of tools being developed at NEC (for NEC’s use, not open source) for the development and maintenance of applications for the cloud. Based on a heavy-weight lifecycle management approach that can be customized for each application development project.

Maximizing Cloud Providers' Revenues via Energy Aware Allocation Policies (CLOUD2010-3017)
Michele Mazzucco, Dmytro Dyachuk, and Ralph Deters (University of Cyprus, Cyprus; University of Saskatchewan, Canada; University of Tartu, Estonia)
Presented the results of simulations that were used to show how cloud providers could increase their revenues by shutting down idle physical servers and moving their VMs to other servers (i.e. load skewing). Tried to address the problem of deciding how many servers to keep switched on in a data centre by using different heuristics. They didn’t actually consider how the performance of applications would be affected by load skewing, and assumed that one VM would run on one core. They also didn’t consider the increased heat production and the cost of cooling the over-utilized servers.

Panel 3: Killer Applications in the Cloud
An interesting panel, but many of the issues that were mentioned have already been discussed in the literature.