Saving the planet with bin packing - Experiences using 2D and 3D bin packing of virtual machines for greener clouds

Abstract

Greener cloud computing has recently become an extremely pertinent research topic in academy and among practitioners. Despite the abundance of the state of the art studies that tackle the problem, the vast majority of them solely rely on simulation, and do not report real settings experience. Thus, the theoretical models might overlook some of the practical details that might emerge in real life scenarios. In this paper, we try to bridge the aforementioned gap in the literature by devising and also deploying algorithms for saving power in real-life cloud environments based on variants of the 2D/3D bin packing algorithms. The algorithms are tested on a large OpenStack deployment in use by staff and students at Oslo and Akershus University College, Norway. We present three different adaptions of 2D and 3D bin packing, incorporating different aspects of the cloud as constraints. Our real-life experimental results show that although the three algorithms yield a decrease in power consumption, they distinctly affect the way the cloud has to be managed. A simple bin packing algorithm provides useful mechanism to reduce power consumption while more sophisticated algorithms do not merely achieve power savings but also minimize the number of migrations.