Cloud computing enables users to provision resources on demand and execute applications in a way that meets their requirements by choosing virtual resources that fit their application resource needs. Then, it becomes the task of cloud resource providers to accommodate these virtual resources onto physical resources. This problem is a fundamental challenge in cloud computing as resource providers need to map virtual resources onto physical resources in a way that takes into account the providers’ optimization objectives. This article surveys the relevant body of literature that deals with this mapping problem and how it can be addressed in different scenarios and through different objectives and optimization techniques. The evaluation aspects of different solutions are also considered. The article aims at both identifying and classifying research done in the area adopting a categorization that can enhance understanding of the problem.

Automation of the execution of computational tasks is at the heart of improving scientific productivity. Over the last years, scientific workflows have been established as an important abstraction that captures data processing and computation of large and complex scientific applications. By allowing scientists to model and express entire data processing steps and their dependencies, workflow management systems relieve scientists from the details of an application and manage its execution on a computational infrastructure. As the resource requirements of today's computational and data science applications that process vast amounts of data keep increasing, there is a compelling case for a new generation of advances in high-performance computing, commonly termed as extreme-scale computing, which will bring forth multiple challenges for the design of workflow applications and management systems. This paper presents a novel characterization of workflow management systems using features commonly associated with extreme-scale computing applications. We classify 15 popular workflow management systems in terms of workflow execution models, heterogeneous computing environments, and data access methods. The paper also surveys workflow applications and identifies gaps for future research on the road to extreme-scale workflows and management systems.

Power and energy efficiency are now critical concerns in extreme-scale high-performance scientific computing. Many extreme-scale computing systems today (for example: Top500) have tight integration of multicore CPU processors and accelerators (mix of Graphical Processing Units, Intel Xeon Phis, or Field Programmable Gate Arrays) empowering them to provide not just unprecedented computational power but also to address these concerns. However, such integration renders these systems highly heterogeneous and hierarchical, thereby necessitating design of novel performance, power, and energy models to accurately capture these inherent characteristics. There are now several extensive research efforts focusing exclusively on power and energy efficiency models and techniques for the processors composing these extreme-scale computing systems. This article synthesizes these research efforts with absolute concentration on predictive power and energy models and prime emphasis on node architecture. Through this survey, we also intend to highlight the shortcomings of these models to correctly and comprehensively predict the power and energy consumptions by taking into account the hierarchical and heterogeneous nature of these tightly integrated high-performance computing systems.

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