Towards Energy-Efficient and Real-Time Cloud Computing

In modern cloud computing environments, there is a tremendous growth of data to be stored and managed in data centers. Large-scale data centers demand high utilization of computing and storage resources, which lead to expensive operational cost for energy usage. Evidence shows that consolidating virtual machines (VMs) can conserve energy consumption in clouds through VM migrations. VM-consolidation techniques, however, inevitably induce a burden on performance. To address this issue, we propose a holistic solution - EGRET - to boost energy efficiency of cloud computing platforms by seamlessly integrating the DVFS scheme with the VM-consolidation technique. EGRET dynamically determines the most energy-efficient strategy by issuing a command to either scale CPU frequencies on a VM or marking the VM as underutilized. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of EGRET. The experimental results show that EGRET substantially improves the energy efficiency of cloud computing platforms.