Towards Energy-Aware Autonomic Provisioning for Virtualized Environments

As energy efficiency and associated costs become key concerns, consolidated and virtualized data centers and clouds are attractive computing platforms for data- and compute-intensive applications. Recently, these platforms are also being considered for more traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. However, maximizing energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and utilization for these applications while ensuring performance and other Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, requires leveraging important and extremely challenging trade-offs. These include, for example, the trade-off between the need to efficiently create and provision Virtual Machines (VMs) on data center resources and the need to accommodate the heterogeneous resource demands and run-times of the applications that run on them.