Cost-effective resource management for distributed computing

Current distributed computing and resource management infrastructures (e.g., Cluster and Grid) suffer from a wide variety of problems related to resource management, which include scalability bottleneck, resource allocation delay, limited quality-of-service (QoS) support, and lack of cost-aware and service level agreement (SLA) mechanisms. This thesis addresses these issues by presenting a cost-effective resource management solution which introduces the possibility of managing geographically distributed resources in resource units that are under the control of a Virtual Authority (VA). A VA is a collection of resources controlled, but not necessarily owned, by a group of users or an authority representing a group of users. It leverages the fact that different resources in disparate locations will have varying usage levels. By creating smaller divisions of resources called VAs, users would be given the opportunity to choose between a variety of cost models, and each VA could rent resources from resource providers when necessary, or could potentially rent out its own resources when underloaded. The resource management is simplified since the user and owner of a resource recognize only the VA because all permissions and charges are associated directly with the VA. The VA is controlled by a ’rental’ policy which is supported by a pool of resources that the system may rent from external resource providers. As far as scheduling is concerned, the VA is independent from competitors and can instead concentrate on managing its own resources. As a result, the VA offers scalable resource management with minimal infrastructure and operating costs. We demonstrate the feasibility of the VA through both a practical implementation of the prototype system and an illustration of its quantitative advantages through the use of extensive simulations. First, the VA concept is demonstrated through a practical implementation of the prototype system. Further, we perform a cost-benefit analysis of current distributed resource infrastructures to demonstrate the potential cost benefit of such a VA system. We then propose a costing model for evaluating the cost effectiveness of the VA approach by using an economic approach that captures revenues generated from applications and expenses incurred from renting resources. Based on our costing methodology, we present rental policies that can potentially offer effective mechanisms for running distributed and parallel applications without a heavy upfront investment and without the cost of maintaining idle resources. By using real workload trace data, we test the effectiveness of our proposed rental approaches. Finally, we propose an extension to the VA framework that promotes long-term negotiations and rentals based on service level agreements or long-term contracts. Based on the extended framework, we present new SLA-aware policies and evaluate them using real workload traces to demonstrate their