Holistic VM Placement for Distributed Parallel Applications in Heterogeneous Clusters

In a heterogeneous cluster, virtual machine (VM) placement for a distributed parallel application is challenging due to numerous possible ways of placing the application and complexity of estimating the performance of the application. This study investigates a holistic VM placement technique for distributed parallel applications in a heterogeneous cluster, aiming to maximize the efficiency of the cluster and consequently reduce the costs for service providers and users. The proposed technique accommodates various factors that have an impact on performance in a combined manner. First, we analyze the effects of the heterogeneity of resources, different VM configurations, and interference between VMs on the performance of distributed parallel applications with a wide diversity of characteristics, including scientific and big data analytics applications. We then propose a placement technique that uses a machine learning algorithm to estimate the runtime of a distributed parallel application. To train a performance estimation model, a distributed parallel application is profiled against synthetic workloads that mostly utilize the dominant resource of the application, which strongly affects the application performance, reducing the profiling space dramatically. Through experimental and simulation studies, we show that the proposed placement technique can find good VM placement configurations for various workloads.