In recent years, the use of cloud computing has increased exponentially to satisfy computing needs in both big and small organizations. However, the high amounts of power consumed by cloud data centres have raised concern. A major cause of power wastage in cloud computing is inefficient utilization of computing resources. In Infrastructure as a Service, the inefficiency is caused when users request for more resources for virtual machines than is required. In this paper, we propose a technique for automatic virtual machine sizing and resource usage prediction using neural networks, for multi-tenant Infrastructure as a Service cloud service model. The proposed technique aims at reducing energy wastage in data centres by efficient resource utilization. An evaluation of our technique on CloudSim Plus cloud simulator and WEKA shows that effective VM sizing not only achieves energy savings but also reduces the cost of using cloud services from a customer perspective.
Virtual machine (VM) consolidation in data centres is a technique that is used to ensure minimum use of physical servers (hosts) leading to better utilization of computing resources and energy savings. To achieve these goals, this technique requires that the estimated VM size is on the basis of application workload resource demands so as to maximize resources utilization, not only at host-level but also at VM-level. This is challenging especially in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) public clouds where customers select VM sizes set beforehand by the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) without the knowledge of the amount of resources their applications need. More often, the resources are overprovisioned and thus go to waste, yet these resources consume power and are paid for by the customers. In this paper, we propose a technique for determining fixed VM sizes, which satisfy application workload resource demands. Because of the dynamic nature of cloud workloads, we show that any resource demands that exceed fixed VM resources can be addressed via statistical multiplexing. The proposed technique is evaluated using VM usage data obtained from a production data centre consisting of 49 hosts and 520 VMs. The evaluations show that the proposed technique reduces energy consumption, memory wastage and CPU wastage by at least 40%, 61% and 41% respectively.
A decision tree is a data classification technique that is used in mining data. The use of data mining techniques on data related to student performance assists in extracting valuable information from large data sets available within the institutions. This paper discusses the factors that influence the student learning process in an internet mediated environment and presents results from data collected within universities in Kenya. Additionally, this paper uses a decision tree to affirm these factors that affect student performance within the universities. The decision tree generated acts as a prediction tool that assists in the prediction of student performance while using internet technology in the learning process. This enables us determine whether a student is likely to perform well or not while using internet technology in the learning process.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.