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1. Flexible VM Provisioning for Time-Sensitive Applications with Multiple Execution Options

   Begam, Rehana; Moradi, Hamidreza; Wang, Wei; Zhu, Dakai (July 2018, IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing)

   Several recent studies have investigated the virtual machine (VM) provisioning problem for requests with time constraints (deadlines) in cloud systems. These studies typically assumed that a request is associated with a single execution time when running on VMs with a given resource demand. In this paper, we consider modern applications that are normally implemented with generic frameworks that allow them to execute with various numbers of threads on VMs with different resource demands. For such applications, it is possible for the users to specify multiple execution options (MEOs) for a request where each execution option is represented by a certain number of VMs with some resources to run the application and its corresponding execution time. We investigate the problem of virtual machine provisioning for such time-sensitive requests with MEOs in resource-constrained clouds. By incorporating the MEOs of requests, we propose several novel and flexible VM provisioning schemes that carefully balance resource usage efficiency, input workloads and request deadlines with the objective of achieving higher resource utilization and system benefits. We evaluated the proposed MEO-aware schemes on various workloads with both benchmark requests and synthetic requests. The results show that our MEO-aware algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art schemes that consider only a single execution option of requests by serving up to 38% more requests and achieving up to 27% more benefits. 

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2. Multiverse: Dynamic VM Provisioning for Virtualized High Performance Computing Clusters

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CCGrid49817.2020.00-80  

   Gunasekaran, Jashwant Raj; Cui, Michael; Thinakaran, Prashanth; Simons, Josh; Kandemir, Mahmut T.; Das, Chita R. (May 2020, 2020 20th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGRID),)

   Traditionally, HPC workloads have been deployed in bare-metal clusters; but the advances in virtualization have led the pathway for these workloads to be deployed in virtualized clusters. However, HPC cluster administrators/providers still face challenges in terms of resource elasticity and virtual machine (VM) provisioning at large-scale, due to the lack of coordination between a traditional HPC scheduler and the VM hypervisor (resource management layer). This lack of interaction leads to low cluster utilization and job completion throughput. Furthermore, the VM provisioning delays directly impact the overall performance of jobs in the cluster. Hence, there is a need for effectively provisioning virtualized HPC clusters, which can best-utilize the physical hardware with minimal provisioning overheads.Towards this, we propose Multiverse, a VM provisioning framework, which can dynamically spawn VMs for incoming jobs in a virtualized HPC cluster, by integrating the HPC scheduler along with VM resource manager. We have implemented this framework on the Slurm scheduler along with the vSphere VM resource manager. In order to reduce the VM provisioning overheads, we use instant cloning which shares both the disk and memory with the parent VM, when compared to full VM cloning which has to boot-up a new VM from scratch. Measurements with real-world HPC workloads demonstrate that, instant cloning is 2.5× faster than full cloning in terms of VM provisioning time. Further, it improves resource utilization by up to 40%, and cluster throughput by up to 1.5×, when compared to full clone for bursty job arrival scenarios. 

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3. Kamino: Efficient VM Allocation at Scale with Latency-Driven Cache-Aware Scheduling

   Domingo, David; Barbalho, Hugo; Molinaro, Marco; Liu, Kuan; Pan, Abhisek; Dion, David; Moscibroda, Thomas; Kannan, Sudarsun; Menache, Ishai (July 2025, ACM)

   In virtual machine (VM) allocation systems, caching repetitive and similar VM allocation requests and associated resolution rules is crucial for reducing computational costs and meeting strict latency requirements. While modern allocation systems distribute requests among multiple allocator agents and use caching to improve performance, current schedulers often neglect the cache state and latency considerations when assigning each new request to an agent. Due to the high variance in costs of cache hits and misses and the associated processing overheads of updating the caches, simple load-balancing and cache-aware mechanisms result in high latencies. We introduce Kamino, a high-performance, latencydriven and cache-aware request scheduling system aimed at minimizing end-to-end latencies. Kamino employs a novel scheduling algorithm grounded in theory which uses partial indicators from the cache state to assign each new request to the agent with the lowest estimated latency. Evaluation of Kamino using a high-fidelity simulator on large-scale production workloads shows a 42% reduction in average request latencies. Our deployment of Kamino in the control plane of a large public cloud confirms these improvements, with a 33% decrease in cache miss rates and a 17% reduction in memory usage 

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4. Optimal Admission Policy in a Cloud Data Center with Priority and Non-Priority Tasks

   Ni, Wenlong; Zhang, Yuhong; Li, Wei (May 2025, Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025)

   This paper studies a cloud datacenter (DC) consisting of two types of tasks with different priority levels. While non-priority tasks generally request the use of a single virtual machine (VM), priority tasks may utilize multiple available VMs to accelerate processing. We focus on determining whether to accept or reject non-priority tasks to maximize overall system benefits. By formulating the problem as a stochastic dynamic program, it is verified that the best approach for handling nonpriority tasks adheres to a control-limit framework. Both experimental outcomes and numerical evaluations highlight the efficacy of the proposed method, leading to the identification of the optimal threshold. The key contribution of this paper is the development of a stochastic dynamic program for DC resource management and the explicit derivation of an optimal control-limit policy. Both value iteration and linear programming methods are utilized to solve optimization problems. These results offer essential understanding for assessing the performance of various DC models, optimizing both rewards and resources efficiently. 

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5. Wasserstein Adversarial Transformer for Cloud Workload Prediction

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i11.21509  

   Arbat, Shivani; Jayakumar, Vinodh Kumaran; Lee, Jaewoo; Wang, Wei; Kim, In Kee (June 2022, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Predictive VM (Virtual Machine) auto-scaling is a promising technique to optimize cloud applications’ operating costs and performance. Understanding the job arrival rate is crucial for accurately predicting future changes in cloud workloads and proactively provisioning and de-provisioning VMs for hosting the applications. However, developing a model that accurately predicts cloud workload changes is extremely challenging due to the dynamic nature of cloud workloads. Long- Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) models have been developed for cloud workload prediction. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art LSTM model leverages recurrences to predict, which naturally adds complexity and increases the inference overhead as input sequences grow longer. To develop a cloud workload prediction model with high accuracy and low inference overhead, this work presents a novel time-series forecasting model called WGAN-gp Transformer, inspired by the Transformer network and improved Wasserstein-GANs. The proposed method adopts a Transformer network as a generator and a multi-layer perceptron as a critic. The extensive evaluations with real-world workload traces show WGAN- gp Transformer achieves 5× faster inference time with up to 5.1% higher prediction accuracy against the state-of-the-art. We also apply WGAN-gp Transformer to auto-scaling mechanisms on Google cloud platforms, and the WGAN-gp Transformer-based auto-scaling mechanism outperforms the LSTM-based mechanism by significantly reducing VM over-provisioning and under-provisioning rates. 

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