Exploiting non-dedicated resources for cloud computing

—Popular web services and applications such as Google Apps, DropBox, and Go.Pc introduce a wasteful imbalance of processing resources. Each host operated by a provider serves hundreds to thousands of users, treating their PCs as thin clients. Tapping the processing, storage and networking capacities of these non-dedicated resources promises to reduce the size of required hardware basis significantly. Consequently, it presents a noteworthy opportunity for service providers and operators of cloud computing infrastructures. We investigate how a mixture of dedicated (and so highly available) hosts and non-dedicated (and so highly volatile) hosts can be used to provision a processing tier of a large-scale web service. We discuss an operational model which guarantees long-term availability despite of host churn, and study multiple aspects necessary to implement it. These include: ranking of non-dedicated hosts according to their long-term availability behavior, short-term availability mod...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: NOMS
• Authors: Artur Andrzejak, Derrick Kondo, David P. Anderson
• Keywords: Availability, Communications, Long-term Availability, NOMS 2010, Web Service