Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 1.
Configurations of the hardware tested
CPU
RAM
Cores
Threads
Cache
Intel Core i7-4770
16 GB DDR3
4
8
8 MB
Intel Core i7-2600
16 GB DDR3
4
8
8 MB
Intel Core i5-660
8 GB DDR3
2
4
4 MB
Intel Core 2 Duo e7600
4 GB DDR3
2
2
3 MB
Intel Core 2 Duo e6300
4 GB DDR2
2
2
2 MB
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
8 GB DDR2
2
2
1 MB
In order to avoid bias, the tests were conducted on separate virtual environments
supported by two different hypervisors type II, VMware Workstation 10 (using .vmx
files) and VirtualBox 4.3 (using .vdi files). Consequently, the simultaneous execu-
tion of both hypervisors on the same desktop is not within the scope of this research.
Each virtual machine had a new and default Debian 7 installation with the Oracle
Java Virtual Machine (JVM) version 7.0.15. The hardware specifications for each
virtual machine consisted of the use of 1 CPU core and 1 GB of RAM. Additionally,
each virtual machine had the VMware Tools or the VBox Guest Additions installed
(according to the hypervisor) in order to facilitate its management and deployment.
3.2
Test Deployment
Desktop Grid System:
The tests were assisted by UnaCloud [11], our local opportu-
nistic Cloud Computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) implementation. Similarly
to a Local Desktop Grid solution, UnaCloud is able to opportunistically execute single
instances and/or clusters of virtual machines. It is important to emphasize that such
execution is mostly supported by off-the-shelf, non-dedicated, distributed, and hete-
rogeneous computing resources (such as desktops) that may belong to a variety of
administrative domains. Furthermore, UnaCloud uses virtualization technologies as a
strategy to enable on-demand deployments of customized execution environments
that meet complex computing requirements from e-Science projects. UnaCloud ex-
ecutes each virtual machine as a low-priority process that remains running in back-
ground. Such deployment features enable harvesting idle computing resources oppor-
tunistically, that is, virtual machines are executed while an end-user is simultaneously
utilizing the desktop or when it is fully available. In consequence, UnaCloud design
specifications strongly consider intrusiveness, since it runs over computer laboratories
mainly used by students to perform their daily work. In such a context, the manage-
ment and utilization of idle computing resources must be as least intrusive as possible.
Virtual environment:
The test scenarios differed in the amount of virtual machines
concurrently executed on the physical machine. This number was in a range from no
virtual machines to a number equivalent to the amount of physical CPU cores. In addi-
tion, all the virtual machines used were rebooted before and after each test scenario in
