Digital Commons Network^™

A Holistic Approach To Lowering Latency In Geo-Distributed Web Applications, Shankaranarayanan Puzhavakath Narayanan

Open Access Dissertations

User perceived end-to-end latency of web applications have a huge impact on the revenue for many businesses. The end-to-end latency of web applications is impacted by: (i) User to Application server (front-end) latency which includes downloading and parsing web pages, retrieving further objects requested by javascript executions; and (ii) Application and storage server(back-end) latency which includes retrieving meta-data required for an initial rendering, and subsequent content based on user actions.

Improving the user-perceived performance of web applications is challenging, given their complex operating environments involving user-facing web servers, content distribution network (CDN) servers, multi-tiered application servers, and storage servers. Further, …

Optimal "Big Data" Aggregation Systems - From Theory To Practical Application, William J. Culhane Iv

Open Access Dissertations

The integration of computers into many facets of our lives has made the collection and storage of staggering amounts of data feasible. However, the data on its own is not so useful to us as the analysis and manipulation which allows manageable descriptive information to be extracted. New tools to extract this information from ever growing repositories of data are required.

Some of these analyses can take the form of a two phase problem which is easily distributed to take advantage of available computing power. The first phase involves computing some descriptive partial result from some subset of the original …

A Programming Framework To Ease Development Of Tightly-Coupled Cloud Applications, Wei-Chiu Chuang

Open Access Dissertations

Cloud application development is currently for professionals only. To make the cloud more accessible, cloud applications should ideally be easy to develop so that virtually anyone can develop their own cloud applications. However, they are difficult to develop, because they are essentially distributed systems, where the concurrent operations may take place, and reasoning about the behavior of concurrent operations to ensure correctness is not trivial. Additionally, programmers must consider failure handling, scalability, consistency, modularity, elasticity.

Improving Virtual Machine I/O Performance In Cloud Environments Via I/O Functionality Offloading, Sahan Bamunavita Gamage

Open Access Dissertations

In recent years there has been a rapid growth in the adoption of cloud computing. A key technology that drives cloud computing is virtualization. In addition to enabling multi-tenancy in cloud environments, virtualizing hosts in the cloud environments has made management of hardware resources increasingly flexible. An important consequence of virtualizing hosts in the cloud is the negative impact it has on the I/O performance of the applications running in the virtual machines.

In this dissertation, we address the important problem of alleviating the negative impact of virtualization on I/O of the virtual machines. First, we show that virtual machine …

Improving Data Center Resource Management, Deployment, And Availability With Virtualization, Timothy Wood

Open Access Dissertations

The increasing demand for storage and computation has driven the growth of large data centers--the massive server farms that run many of today's Internet and business applications. A data center can comprise many thousands of servers and can use as much energy as a small city. The massive amounts of computation power contained in these systems results in many interesting distributed systems and resource management problems. In this thesis we investigate challenges related to data centers, with a particular emphasis on how new virtualization technologies can be used to simplify deployment, improve resource efficiency, and reduce the cost of reliability, …