Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers are offering their unused resources in the form of variable-priced virtual machines (VMs), known as "spot instances", at prices significantly lower than their standard fixed-priced resources. To lease spot instances, users specify a maximum price they are willing to pay per hour and VMs will run only when the current price is lower than the user’s bid. This paper proposes a resource allocation policy that addresses the problem of running deadlineconstrained compute-intensive jobs on a pool of composed solely of spot instances, while exploiting variations in price and performance to run applications in a fast and economical way. Our policy relies on job runtime estimations to decide what are the best types of VMs to run each job and when jobs should run. Several estimation methods are evaluated and compared, using trace-based simulations, which take real price variation traces obtained from Amazon Web Services as input, as well as an application trace from the Parallel Workload Archive. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of running computational jobs on spot instances, at a fraction (up to 60% lower) of the price that would normally cost on fixed priced resources.

Item Type:	Refereed Conference Paper
Keywords:	spot market, virtual clusters, cloud computing
Research Division:	Information and Computing Sciences
Research Group:	Distributed computing and systems software
Research Field:	Distributed systems and algorithms
Objective Division:	Information and Communication Services
Objective Group:	Information systems, technologies and services
Objective Field:	Information systems, technologies and services not elsewhere classified
UTAS Author:	Garg, SK (Dr Saurabh Garg)
ID Code:	93884
Year Published:	2011
Deposited By:	Information and Communication Technology
Deposited On:	2014-08-20
Last Modified:	2014-12-08
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