With the advent of Docker, it becomes popular to bundle Web applications (apps) and their libraries into lightweight linux containers and offer them to a wide public by deploying them in the cloud. Compared to previous approaches, like deploying apps in cloud-provided virtual machines (VMs), the use of containers allows faster start-up and less overhead. However, having containers inside VMs ma...

Recent developments in the commercial open source community have catalysed the use of Linux containers for scalable deployment of web-based applications to the cloud. Scientific software can be containerized with dependencies, configuration files, post-processing tools and even simulation results, referred to as containerized computing. This new approach promises to significantly improve sustai...

Linux containers in the commercial world are changing the landscape for application development and deployments. Container technologies are also making inroads into HPC environments, as exemplified by NERSC’s Shifter and LBL’s Singularity. While the first generation of HPC containers offers some of the same benefits as the existing open container frameworks, like CoreOS or Docker, they do not a...

Many seemingly simple questions that individual users face in their daily lives may actually require substantial number of computing resources to identify the right answers. For example, a user may want to determine the right thermostat settings for different rooms of a house based on a tolerance range such that the energy consumption and costs can be maximally reduced while still offering comf...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and describe a new Ruby benchmarking tool. We will describe the background of Ruby benchmarking and the advantages of the new tool. The paper documents the benchmarking process as well as methods used to obtain results and run tests. To illustrate the provided tool, results that were obtained by running a developed benchmarking tool on existing and avai...

Hypervisors and Operating Systems support vertical elasticity techniques such as memory ballooning to dynamically assign the memory of Virtual Machines (VMs). However, current Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs), such as OpenNebula or OpenStack, do not currently support dynamic vertical elasticity. This paper describes a system that integrates with the CMP to provide automatic vertical elasticity...