Quantifying and detecting HPC resource wastage in cloud environments

Among many details that users need to consider when using cloud computing, the care not to waste resources requires more attention by administrators and new users. When the application does not fully utilize the provisioned resource, the end-of-the-month bill is unnecessarily increased. Several studies have developed solutions to avoid wastage using predictive techniques. Nonetheless, these approaches require applications’ to have predictive behavior and depend on pre-executions or history data. To circumvent these limitations, we explore how a reactive solution can be used to detect and contain wastage. More specifically, we discuss several important issues that arise when quantifying resource wastage caused by HPC resource wastage on the cloud and propose a reactive strategy to quantify, detect, and contain resource wastage in this context. This solution is designed so that it can be applied in environments with expert and non-expert users with no prior knowledge about the applications.