Significant application performance improvements can be achieved by heterogeneous compute technologies, such as multi-core CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. The HARNESS project is developing architectural principles that enable the next generation cloud platforms to incorporate such devices thereby vastly increasing performance, reducing energy consumption, and lowering associated cost profiles. Along with management and integration of such devices in a cloud environment, a key issue is enabling enterprise-level software to make effective use of such compute devices. A major obstacle in adopting heterogeneous compute resources is the requirement that at design time the developer must decide on which device to execute portions of the application. For an interactive application, such as SAP HANA where there are many on-going tasks and processes, this type of decision is impossible to predict at design time. What is required is the ability to decide, at run-time, the optimal compute device to execute a task. This paper extends upon existing work on SHEPARD to support non-OpenCL devices. SHEPARD decouples application development from the target platform and enables the required run-time allocation of tasks to heterogeneous computing devices. This paper establishes SHEPARD's capability to: (1) select the appropriate compute device to execute tasks, (2) dynamically load the device application code at runtime, and (3) execute the application logic. Experiments demonstrate how SHEPARD optimises the execution of a SAP HANA database management function across heterogeneous compute devices and perform automatic run-time task allocation.

We investigate the feasibility of detecting host-level CPU contention from inside a guest virtual machine (VM). Our methodology involves running benchmarks with deterministic and randomized execution times inside a guest VM in a private cloud testbed. Simultaneously, using the recently proposed COCOMA tool, we expose the guest VM to host-level CPU stealing events of increasing intensity. This leads us to observe that the use of hyper-threading in the host can hinder detection of CPU contention, which otherwise can be done accurately using the CPU steal metric. For systems where hyper-threading is enabled, we investigate the performance of some basic detection algorithms. We find that thresholding often outperforms more sophisticated statistical tests.

BonFIRE is a multi-site test bed that supports testing of Cloud-based and distributed applications. BonFIRE breaks the mould of commercial Cloud offerings by providing unique functionality in terms of observability, control, advanced Cloud features and ease of use for experimentation. A number of successful use cases have been executed on BonFIRE, involving industrial and academic users and delivering impact in diverse areas, such as media, e-health, environment and manufacturing. The BonFIRE user-base is expanding through its free, Open Access scheme, daily carrying out important research, while the consortium is working to sustain the facility beyond 2014.

Cloud-based software testing is today predominantly focused on testing services provided in the cloud. Secondly, the properties of the testing process are often highlighted as opposed to the infrastructure. A taxonomy of 5 patterns for testing in the cloud and 7 criteria for effective infrastructure is presented. The practicality and relevance of the taxonomy are demonstrated with an application study in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) domain. This domain has been selected as there are no extensive studies on testing PaaS applications.

Adaptive clustering is one of the fundamental problems behind autonomic systems and, more generally, an open research issue in the area of networking and distributed systems. The problem of giving structure to large-scale, dynamic systems through clustering and of electing centrally located nodes (cluster heads) is nontrivial. This is in fact an NP-complete problem when striving for optimality. We propose an innovative strategy based on code mobility that dynamically computes near-optimal clusters in linear time. Our approach is autonomic, does not require any user intervention, is self-configuring, self-optimal, and self-healing. We demonstrate these features through an extensive set of simulations, discussing the viability of the algorithm based on state-of-the art technologies, and elaborating on its applicability to distributed monitoring, peer-to-peer systems, application-level multicast, and content adaptation networks.