Cloud Computing I/O Virtualization Congestion

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is gaining popularity to virtualize the datacentre and increase adaptability in the use of computation resources. This type of system is best demonstrated by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and related products. Recently, a new open source framework called Eucalyptus has been released that allows users to create private cloud computing grids that are API compatible with the existing Amazon standards. Eucalyptus leverages existing virtualization technology and popular Linux distributions. Using automated scripts provided with Ubuntu, a private cloud can be installed, from graze, in under 30 minutes. Here, Eucalyptus is tested using I/O extensive applications to determine if its performance is as good as its ease of use. Unfortunately, limitations in commodity I/O virtualization technology restrict the out of the box storage bandwidth to 51% and 77% of a non-virtualized disk for writes and reads, respectively. Similarly, out of the box network bandwidth to another host is only 71% and 45% of non-virtualized performance for transmit and receive workloads, respectively. These congestions are present even on a test system massively over gratify in both memory and computation resources. Similar restrictions are also evident in commercial clouds provided by Amazon, showing that even after much research effort I/O virtualization congestion still challenge the designers of modern systems.

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