Honours projects 2010

Projects supervised by Albert Zomaya

Virtualisation and Beyond for Greening IT
The major technological shift being witnessed particularly in the past few years is the advocacy of sustainability (more specifically, green IT in our case) from high performance. The field of green IT has already become a major research and development priority not just in academia and industry (e.g., Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and VMWare). Many countries including Australia also have initiated numerous national/international investigation and development efforts to make IT more energy efficient. At first glance, this is related to the development of low-power and energy-efficient hardware technologies. However, greening IT goes beyond advancements of hardware. Software approaches like energy-aware scheduling and resource allocation can significantly reduce environmental footprints (e.g., energy consumption and carbon emissions). There are multiple levels in computer systems we can apply software approaches to including platforms, operating systems, virtual machines and service-level management. In this project, we will investigate various software-based energy-saving techniques primarily focusing on virtual machine monitoring and service-level workload management. Students involved in this project will have a chance to conduct their investigation and development using virtualization tools (e.g., VMWare products, Xen hypervisor and Sun Microsystems VirtualBox) in real multiprocessor computing systems. The resulting methodology of this project can have an immediate real-world impact. Students with good programming background particularly in Unix-like environments are encouraged to apply.

Link Service Level Agreement (SLA) to Cloud Computing Energy Efficiency
The cloud computing paradigm enables multiple tenants to share a set of physical resources. It is of a cloud infrastructure provider’s interest to make efficient use of these physical resources in terms of cutting off its energy bill. The tenants, on the other hand, are interested in the quality of service they receive, which means that a tenant expects a resource is available when needed. The efficiency requirement from the provider often conflicts with the resource availability requirements from the tenants. The confliction can be reconciled through reaching a Service Level Agreement (SLA). However, there is a gap between SLA metrics and the underlying mechanisms for achieving efficiency. The project will examine common SLA metrics and investigate how to link SLA metrics to efficient resource allocation schemes. The outcome of the project will be a realistic model evaluated in a cloud computing platform and/or a few SLA-aware resource allocation algorithms based on the model. The student is expected to understand operating systems well and have basic performance modelling knowledge.