PAC: Pattern-driven Application Consolidation for Efficient Cloud Computing

To reduce cloud system resource cost, application consolidation is a must. In this paper, we present a novel pattern driven application consolidation (PAC) system to achieve efficient resource sharing in virtualized cloud computing infrastructures. PAC employs signal processing techniques to dynamically discover significant patterns called signatures of different applications and hosts. PAC then performs dynamic application consolidation based on the extracted signatures. We have implemented a prototype of the PAC system on top of the Xen virtual machine platform and tested it on the NCSU Virtual Computing Lab. We have tested our system using RUBiS benchmarks, Hadoop data processing systems, and IBM System S stream processing system. Our experiments show that 1) PAC can efficiently discover repeating resource usage patterns in the tested applications; 2) Signatures can reduce resource prediction errors by 50-90% compared to traditional coarse-grained schemes; 3) PAC can improve application performance by up to 50% when running a large number of applications on a shared cluster.