IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) is a scholarly archival journal published monthly. Parallelism and distributed computing are foundational research and technology to rapidly advance computer systems and their applications. Read the full scope of TPDS

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From the July 2017 Issue

Sharing-Aware Online Virtual Machine Packing in Heterogeneous Resource Clouds

By Safraz Rampersaud and Daniel Grosu

One of the key problems that cloud providers need to efficiently solve when offering on-demand virtual machine (VM) instances to a large number of users is the VM Packing problem, a variant of Bin Packing. The VM Packing problem requires determining the assignment of user requested VM instances to physical servers such that the number of physical servers is minimized. In this paper, we consider a more general variant of the VM Packing problem, called the Sharing-Aware VM Packing problem, that has the same objective as the standard VM Packing problem, but allows the VM instances collocated on the same physical server to share memory pages, thus reducing the amount of cloud resources required to satisfy the users’ demand. Our main contributions consist of designing several online algorithms for solving the Sharing-Aware VM Packing problem, and performing an extensive set of experiments to compare their performance against that of several existing sharing-oblivious online algorithms. For small problem instances, we also compare the performance of the proposed online algorithms against the optimal solution obtained by solving the offline variant of the Sharing-Aware VM Packing problem (i.e., the version of the problem that assumes that the set of VM requests are known a priori). The experimental results show that our proposed sharing-aware online algorithms activate a smaller average number of physical servers relative to the sharing-oblivious algorithms, directly reduce the amount of required memory, and thus, require fewer physical servers to instantiate the VM instances requested by users.

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Editorials and Announcements

Announcements

• According to Thomson Reuters' 2013 Journal Citation Report, TPDS has an impact factor of 2.173.


• TPDS celebrates its 25th Anniversary. Editor-in-Chief David A. Bader says, "Congratulations to TPDS on its Silver Jubilee! For 25 years, TPDS has been the parallel and distributed computing community's flagship journal for research breakthroughs!"


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Editorials

• Editor's Note (January 2017)
• Editor's Note (January 2016)
• Editor's Note (January 2015)
• State of the Journal (January 2014)
• Editor's Note: EIC Farewell and New EIC Introduction (Dec 2013)
• Editor's Note (November 2013)
• Editor's Note (January 2013)
• Editor's Note (April 2012)
• Editor's Note (January 2012)
• Editorial: Media Center (November 2011)
• Editor's Note: How to Write Research Articles in Computing and Engineering Disciplines by Ivan Stojmenovic
• Full Supplemental PDF of Editor's Note: How to Write Research Articles in Computing and Engineering Disciplines by Ivan Stojmenovic and Veljko Milutinovic (PDF)

Guest Editorials

• Special Issue on Trust, Security, and Privacy in Parallel and Distributed Systems (Feb 2014)
• Special Issue on Cloud Computing (June 2013)
• Special Issue on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) (Sept 2012)
• Special Section on Many-Task Computing (June 2011)

Reviewers List

• 2016 TPDS Reviewers List (PDF)

Annual Index

• 2016 TPDS Annual Index (PDF)

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