Abstract-Cloud computing nowadays becomes quite popular among a community of cloud users by offering a variety of resources. However, burstiness in user demands often dramatically degrades the application performance. In order to satisfy peak user demands and meet Service Level Agreement (SLA), efficient resource allocation schemes are highly demanded in the cloud. However, we find that conventional load balancers unfortunately neglect cases of bursty arrivals and thus experience significant performance degradation. Motivated by this problem, we propose new burstiness-aware algorithms to balance bursty workloads across all computing sites, and thus to improve overall system performance. We present a smart load balancer, which leverages the knowledge of burstiness to predict the changes in user demands and on-the-fly shifts between the schemes that are "greedy" (i.e., always select the best site) and "random" (i.e., randomly select one) based on the predicted information. Both simulation and real experimental results show that this new load balancer can adapt quickly to the changes in user demands and thus improve performance by making a smart site selection for cloud users under both bursty and non-bursty workloads.
Maximum likelihood (ML) estimation is used during tomosynthesis mammography reconstruction. A single reconstruction involves the processing of highresolution projection images, which is both computeintensive and time-consuming. This workload is presently a bottleneck in the accurate diagnosis of breast cancer during screening. This paper presents our parallelization work on an ML algorithm using three different partitioning models: no inter-communication, overlap with inter-communication and non-overlap model. These models are evaluated to obtain the best reconstruction performance given a range of computing environments with different computational power and network speed. Our test results show that the non-overlap method outperforms the other two methods on all five computing platforms evaluated. This parallelization of ML has enabled tomosynthesis to become a viable technology in the breast screening clinic, reducing reconstruction time from 3 hours on a PentiumIV workstation to 6 minutes on a 32-node PentiumIV cluster.
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