Building and scaling virtual clusters with residual resources from interactive clouds

The popularity of cloud-based interactive computing services (e.g., virtual desktops) brings new management challenges. Each interactive user leaves abundant but fluctuating residual resources while being intolerant to latency, precluding the use of aggressive VM consolidation. In this paper, we present the Resource Harvester for Interactive Clouds (RHIC), an autonomous management framework that harnesses dynamic residual resources aggressively without slowing the harvested interactive services. RHIC builds ad-hoc clusters for running throughput-oriented "background" workloads using a hybrid of residual and dedicated resources. For a given background job, RHIC intelligently discovers/maintains the ideal cluster size and composition, to meet user-specified goals such as cost/energy minimization or deadlines. RHIC employs black-box workload performance modeling, requiring only system-level metrics and incorporating techniques to improve modeling accuracy under bursty and heterogeneous residual resources. Our results show that RHIC finds near-ideal cluster sizes/compositions across a wide range of workload/goal combinations, significantly outperforms alternative approaches, tolerates high instability in the harvested interactive cloud, works with heterogeneous hardware and imposes minimal overhead.