Quantitative workload analysis and prediction using Google cluster traces

Resource allocation efficiency and energy consumption are among the top concerns to today's Cloud data center. Finding the optimal point where users' multiple job requests can be accomplished timely with minimum electricity and hardware cost is one of the key factors for system designers and managers to optimize the system configurations. Understanding the characteristics of the distribution of user task is an essential step for this purpose. At large-scale Cloud Computing data centers, a precise workload prediction will significantly help designers and operators to schedule hardware/software resources and power supplies in a more efficient manner, and make appropriate decisions to upgrade the Cloud system when the workload grows. While a lot of study has been conducted for hypervisor-based Cloud, container-based virtualization is becoming popular because of the low overhead and high efficiency in utilizing computing resources. In this paper, we have studied a set of real-world container data center traces from part of Google's cluster. We investigated the distribution of job duration, waiting time and machine utilization and the number of jobs submitted in a fix time period. Based on the quantitative study, an Ensemble Workload Prediction (EnWoP) method and a novel prediction evaluation parameter called Cloud Workload Correction Rate (C-Rate) have been proposed. The experimental results have verified that the EnWoP method achieved high prediction accuracy and the C-Rate evaluates the prediction methods more objective.