Modeling cloud failure data: a case study of the virtual computing lab

Virtual Computing Lab is a higher education cloud computing environment that on demand, allocates a chosen software stack on the required hardware and gives access to the customers, in this case NCSU students, faculty and staff. VCL has been in operation since 2004. An important component of the quality of the services provided by a cloud is the reliability and availability. For example, typical availability of the system exceeds 0.999, and reservation reliability is in the 0.99 range. VCL provides comprehensive information (provenance, logs, etc.) about its execution, its resources, and its performance. We mined the VCL log files to find out more about its reliability and availability, and the character of its faults and failures. This paper presents some of these results.

[1]  Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology , 1990 .

[2]  Mladen A. Vouk,et al.  Using VCL technology to implement distributed reconfigurable data centers and computational services for educational institutions , 2009, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[3]  Michael R. Lyu,et al.  Handbook of software reliability engineering , 1996 .

[4]  Kashi Venkatesh Vishwanath,et al.  Characterizing cloud computing hardware reliability , 2010, SoCC '10.

[5]  Esther R. Steinberg.  Computer-assisted Instruction: A Synthesis of Theory, Practice, and Technology , 1990 .

[6]  Mladen A. Vouk,et al.  Reliability and availability of a wide area network-based education system , 1996, Proceedings of ISSRE '96: 7th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering.

[7]  Mladen A. Vouk,et al.  NCSU's Virtual Computing Lab: A Cloud Computing Solution , 2009, Computer.

[8]  John D. Musa,et al.  A theory of software reliability and its application , 1975, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[9]  Sastry G. Pantula,et al.  Quality of service modeling for wide area network based systems , 1998 .

[10]  D Alpert,et al.  Advances in Computer-based Education. , 1970, Science.

[11]  Rajkumar Buyya,et al.  Market-Oriented Cloud Computing: Vision, Hype, and Reality for Delivering IT Services as Computing Utilities , 2008, 2008 10th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications.

[12]  Mladen A. Vouk,et al.  Cloud Computing – Issues, Research and Implementations , 2008, CIT 2008.

[13]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  A view of cloud computing , 2010, CACM.