An Energy-Efficient Load Balancing Algorithm to Perform Computation Type Application Processes for Virtual Machine Environments

There are various types of high performance, scalable, and fault-tolerant information systems like cloud systems to realize applications on distributed systems. Virtual machines are used to realize these distributed applications in server cluster systems. In order to satisfy application requirements like deadline constraint for each application process, processing load of virtual machines has to balance with one another in a server cluster system. Here, in addition to achieving the performance objectives, the total electric energy consumption of a server cluster system to perform application processes has to be reduced as discussed in Green computing since a server cluster system is composed of large number of servers and consumes a large amount of electric energy to perform application processes. In our previous studies, the power consumption model of a server to perform application processes on virtual machines which migrate on servers is proposed. In addition, the computation model of a virtual machine to perform computation type application processes is proposed. In this paper, we propose the energy consumption laxity based (ECLB) algorithm to allocate computation type application processes to virtual machines in a server cluster based on the proposed computation model and power consumption model so that the total energy consumption of a server cluster and computation time of each process can be reduced. We evaluate the ECLB algorithm in terms of the total energy consumption of a server cluster and computation time of each process compared with basic round-robin (RR) algorithm. Evaluation results show the average total energy consumption of a server cluster and average computation time of each process in the ECLB algorithm can be maximumly reduced to 1.9% and 12.6% of the RR algorithm, respectively.