ECO-CLOUD Project

The ECO-CLOUD project aims to provide an integrated solution to the autonomous energy-efficient management of communication networks and processes in a cloud computing environment. Current research on cloud computing has evolved from, and is dominated by, cluster and grid computing domains where communication aspects are secondary. However, cloud computing systems and cloud applications are fundamentally different from cluster and grid computing, and communications must be considered to unveil their full potential.

To address this gap, the ECO-CLOUD project aims to develop a framework of novel techniques and to deliver efficient solutions, in the form of prototype software, for optimisation of performance and energy-efficiency in (a) network hardware (switches, routers and links), (b) data center communication systems, and (c) communication protocols. In addition, new metrics for assessing the energy efficiency and performance of cloud computing communication systems will be developed and proposed for standardization.

Another important outcome of the ECO-CLOUD project will be the release of a cloud computing simulation platform to offer fine-grained modelling of communication processes. This will be used for performance evaluation and for comparison of the techniques developed which will be further benchmarked in an operational cloud computing facility. The simulation platform will be based on the GreenCloud simulator.

The following are the main objectives and work packages of the project.