06-06-2012, 12:44 PM
Green Cloud computing and
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Abstract:
Cloud computing is a highly scalable and cost-effective infrastructure for running HPC, enterprise and Web applications. However, the growing demand of Cloud infrastructure has drastically increased the energy consumption of data centers, which has become a critical issue. High energy consumption not only translates to high operational cost, which reduces the profit margin of Cloud providers, but also leads to high carbon emissions which is not environmentally friendly. Hence, energy-efficient solutions are required to minimize the impact of Cloud computing on the environment. In order to design such solutions, deep analysis of Cloud is required with respect to their power efficiency.
Introduction
With the growth of high speed networks over the last decades, there is an alarming rise in its usage comprised of thousands of concurrent e-commerce transactions and millions of Web queries a day. This ever-increasing demand is handled through large-scale datacenters, which consolidate hundreds and thousands of servers with other infrastructure such as cooling, storage and network systems. Many internet companies such as Google, Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo are operating such huge datacenters around the world.
What is Cloud computing?
Cloud computing is an evolving paradigm which is enabling outsourcing of all IT needs such as storage, computation and software such as office and ERP, through large Internet. The shift toward such service-oriented computing is driven primarily by ease of management and administration process involving software upgrades and bug fixes. It also allows fast application development and testing for small IT companies that cannot afford large investments on infrastructure. Most important advantage offered by Clouds is in terms of economics of scale; that is, when thousands of users share same facility, cost per user and the server utilization. To enable such facilities, Cloud computing encompasses many technologies and concepts such as virtualization, utility computing, pay as you go, no capital investment, elasticity, scalability, provisioning on demand, and IT outsourcing.
Components of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is mainly composed of three layers which cover all the computing stack of a system. Each of these layers offers different set of services to end users as described in Figure 3. At the lowest layer, Cloud offerings are named as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) which consists of virtual machines or physical machines, storage, and clusters. Cloud infrastructures can also be heterogeneous, integrating clusters, PCs and workstations. Moreover, the system infrastructure can also include database management systems and other storage services. The infrastructure in general is managed by an upper management layer that guarantees runtime environment customization, application isolation, accounting and quality of service. The virtualization tools, such as hypervisors, also sit in this layer to manage the resource pool and to partition physical infrastructure in the form of customized virtual machines. Depending on the end user needs, the virtualized infrastructure is pre-configured with storage and programming environment, what saves time for users who do not need to build their system from scratch.