Project Description

Holistic Energy Efficient Approach for the Management of Hybrid Clouds

Latest research results show that the high percentage of the world-wide CO2 production is caused by operating ICT infrastructures -- data centers in particular. Gartner Inc. estimated that the ICT industry generates about 2% of the total global CO2 emissions, which is equal to the aviation industry. While in areas like transportation, civil engineering, or manufacturing effective prevention of CO2 production is already part of the standardized engineering and production processes, effective prevention of the CO2 production in ICT is in its early stage. The general problem with energy efficient operation of ICT are the current infrastructures, which are traditionally built to deliver peak performance throughout all layers (hardware, software, virtualization) – which as a consequence may cause energy wastage. On the one hand novel computing paradigms like Cloud computing represent a promising technology for the operation of the next generation ICT infrastructures. On the other hand due to the characteristics of Clouds, like virtualization overhead and massive scalability, they exhibit a high rate of energy wastage.

Cloud computing represents a novel and promising approach for implementing scalable ICT systems for individual-, communities-, and business-use. Resources are pooled and offered on-demand with ubiquitous network access to rapidly configurable and elastic IT capabilities. Resources are delivered following three basic delivery models: access to applications (SaaS), provisioning of platforms to create applications (PaaS), and provisioning of infrastructures for processing, storage, and networking (IaaS). The key benefits of providing computing power using Clouds are:

• avoidance of expensive computer systems configured to cope with peak performance
• pay-per-use solutions for computing cycles requested on-demand
• avoidance of idle computing resources, resulting in novel business models. Gartner Inc. has identified Cloud computing as the most important strategic technology for the year 2011.

Guideline goals of this project are therefore:

• to deliver holistic methods for resource management in Cloud computing
• apply the principles of autonomic systems in these methods
• explore novel Cloud engineering models such as cloudbursting or cloudstorming

Project facts

Short project name: HALEY

Full project name: Holistic Energy Efficient Approach for the Management of Hybrid Clouds

Budget: 500 000 €

Funding: Vienna University of Technology science award