Storage Access Optimization with Virtual Machine Migration During Execution of Parallel Data Processing on a Virtual Machine PC Cluster

We have constructed a virtual machine PC cluster that uses a virtual machine as worker nodes, and proposed a method that acquires insufficient resources dynamically from cloud computing systems while basic computation is performed on its own local clusters. Virtual machine environments enable us to manage computer resources flexibly and make use of migration. For data access, we have used iSCSI protocol which supports to access data through IP networks, and migrated virtual machine to cloud where data is stored over a high latency network. We have confirmed that the execution time becomes shorter with the migration of virtual machines even the cost of migration is taken into account, compared with the case of accessing data over a network when an I/O-intensive application is executed.