Multicores in Cloud Computing: Research Challenges for Applications

With modern techniques that allow billions of transistors on a chip, microprocessor design is going to a world of multicore. A cluster of multicores will be commonly used as an efficient computational platform for high performance computing in the near future. Correspondingly, the resource providers, who share their computing elements and storage with customers, will also upgrade their machines to the multicore architecture. At the same time, the dominating resource sharing platforms, in the form of compute Grids, are facing a grand challenge from Cloud computing. With an easy interface, high-level services, and on-demand provision of compute resources, compute Clouds are attracting more users to join their realm. Upcoming Cloud environments will be primarily built on top of multicore technologies. However, to fully exploit the computational capacity and the other advantages of multicores, a lot of novel techniques must be proposed and investigated. This paper serves as an overview for multicore technologies in the context of Cloud computing. This paper firstly introduces multicore technologies and the Cloud computing concept. Then it investigates various open research issues in the context of multicore Cloud computing, for example, how to efficiently employ multicore techniques for Cloud computing, how to achieve the high performance of multicore for high performance applications in the Cloud environments. Several examples and discussion are presented.