Cloud Computing

CONTENTS

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1
Energy Efficiency in Clouds…………………………………………………….………...…..1
Energy-Efficient and Green Cloud Computing Architecture……….……….……...………1-2
Energy-Aware Dynamic Resource Allocation……………………………………….......…2-3
Interclouds and Integrated Allocation of Resources…………………………………………..3
Disadvantages of Green Cloud Computing……………………………………………..…….4
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….....4

Department of MCA
 Cloud Computing

GREEN CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is a rapidly moving target. New technological advances and application
services are regularly introduced. There are many open challenges, especially in the context of
energy efficient management of datacenters and the marketplace for cloud computing.

Energy Efficiency in Clouds

• Modern datacenters that operate under the cloud computing model are hosting a variety
of applications ranging from those that run for a few seconds to those that run for longer
periods of time on shared hardware platforms.

• The need to manage multiple applications in a datacenter creates the challenge of on-
demand resource provisioning and allocation in response to time-varying workloads.

• Normally, datacenter resources are statically allocated to applications based on peak

load characteristics in order to maintain isolation and provide performance guarantees.

• Until recently, high performance has been the sole concern in datacenter deployments,
and this demand has been fulfilled without paying much attention to energy
consumption.

• Datacenters are not only expensive to maintain, they are also unfriendly to the
environment.

• High energy costs and huge carbon footprints are incurred due to the massive amount
of electricity needed to power and cool the numerous servers hosted in these
datacenters.

• Lowering the energy usage of datacenters is a challenging and complex issue because
computing applications and data are growing so quickly that larger servers and disks
are needed to process them fast enough within the required time period.

• Green cloud computing is envisioned to achieve not only efficient processing and
utilization of computing infrastructure but also minimize energy consumption.

Energy-Efficient and Green Cloud Computing Architecture

A high-level architecture for supporting energy-efficient resource allocation in a green cloud
computing infrastructure is shown in Figure 11.2.
It consists of four main components:-
Consumers/brokers: Cloud consumers or their brokers submit service requests from anywhere
in the world to the cloud. It is important to note that there can be a difference between cloud
consumers and users of deployed services. For instance, a consumer can be a company

Department of MCA 1
 Cloud Computing

deploying a Web application, which presents varying workloads according to the number of
“users” accessing it.
Green Resource Allocator: Acts as the interface between the cloud infrastructure and
consumers. It requires the interaction of the following components to support energy-efficient
resource management.

VMs: Multiple VMs can be dynamically started and stopped on a single physical machine to
meet accepted requests, hence providing maximum flexibility to configure various partitions
of resources on the same physical machine to different specific requirements of service
requests. Multiple VMs can also run concurrently applications based on different operating
system environments on a single physical machine.
Physical machines: The underlying physical computing servers provide hardware
infrastructure for creating virtualized resources to meet service demands.

Energy-Aware Dynamic Resource Allocation

• Virtualization enables dynamic migration of VMs across physical nodes.

• Unused VMs can be logically resized and consolidated on a minimal number of

physical nodes, while idle nodes can be turned off (or hibernated).

Department of MCA 2
 Cloud Computing

• Through consolidation of VMs, large numbers of users can share a single physical
server, which increases utilization and in turn reduces the total number of servers
required.

• Currently, resource allocation in a cloud datacenter aims at providing high performance

while meeting SLAs, with limited or no consideration for energy consumption during
VM allocations.

• The current approaches to dynamic VM consolidation are weak in terms of providing

performance guarantees.

• One of the ways to prove performance bounds is to divide the problem of energy-
efficient dynamic VM consolidation into a few subproblems that can be analysed
individually.

• It is important to analytically model the problem and derive optimal and near optimal
approximation algorithms that provide provable efficiency.

Interclouds and Integrated Allocation of Resources

• Intercloud is a network of clouds that are linked with each other.

• Cloud providers have been deploying datacenters in multiple locations throughout the
globe. For example, Amazon EC2 Cloud services are available via Amazon datacenters
located in the United States, Europe, and Singapore.

• This disbursement is leading to the emergence of a notion, called the InterCloud,

supporting scalable delivery of application services by harnessing multiple datacenters
from one or more providers.

• These Interclouds provide a powerful means of reducing energy related costs. One
reason is that the local demand for electricity varies with time of day and weather.

• This causes time-varying differences in the price of electricity at each location.

• Moreover, each site has a different source of energy (such as coal, hydroelectric, or
wind), with different environmental costs. This gives scope to adjust the load sent to
each location, and the number of servers powered on at each location, to improve
efficiency.

Department of MCA 3
 Cloud Computing

Disadvantages of Green Cloud Computing

Implementation Cost is High: The initial investment to adopt green computing processing may
seem costly for medium-sized and small enterprises. We can say that green computing is yet
not so reasonable to everybody.
Advancing Technology will be challenging to Adapt to: Green cloud computing technology
keeps evolving, so it is somewhat difficult for everybody to adapt to instantly.
Green Computers might be Underpowered: As the point is to save energy, the computer
applications that require high power to perform would be badly impacted by green computing.

Conclusion
The management of power consumption in data centers has led to a number of substantial
improvements in energy efficiency. Cloud computing infrastructure is housed in data centers
and has benefited significantly from these advances. Techniques such as sleep scheduling and
virtualization of computing resources in cloud computing data centers improve the energy
efficiency of cloud computing.

Department of MCA 4