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Volume 3 Supplement 1

Special Issue on the Future of Middleware (FOME'11)

On Cloud computational models and the heterogeneity challenge

Journal of Internet Services and Applications volume 3, pages 77–86 (2012)Cite this article

Abstract

Cloud computing is by far the most cost-effective technology for hosting Internet-scale services and applications. The MapReduce model, in particular, is largely used nowadays in Cloud infrastructures to meet the demand of large-scale data and computation intensive applications. Despite its success, the implications of MapReduce on the management of Cloud workload and cluster resources are still largely unstudied. In this article, we show that dealing with the heterogeneity of workloads and machine capabilities is a key challenge. In today’s cloud environment, workloads can have varied sizes, lengths, resource requirements, and arrival rates. The machines also have varied CPU, memory, I/O speed, and network bandwidth capacities. Jointly they pose difficult challenges pertaining, among others, to job scheduling, task and data placement, resource sharing and resource allocation. We analyze the heterogeneity challenge in these specific problem domains and survey the representative state-of-the-art works that try to address them. We found that although advances are made that partially address some of the outlined challenges, there are even more open challenges yet to be explored, and this topic at large is ripe for scientific contributions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

    Raouf Boutaba, Lu Cheng & Qi Zhang

  2. Division of IT Convergence and Engineering, POSTECH, Pohang, 790-784, Korea

    Raouf Boutaba

Authors
  1. Raouf Boutaba
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  2. Lu Cheng
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  3. Qi Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Raouf Boutaba.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Boutaba, R., Cheng, L. & Zhang, Q. On Cloud computational models and the heterogeneity challenge. J Internet Serv Appl 3, 77–86 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13174-011-0054-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13174-011-0054-7

Keywords

  • Cloud computing
  • MapReduce
  • Heterogeneity
  • Scheduling
  • Resource allocation