Estimating the Resource Demand in Power-Aware Clusters by Regressing a Linearly Dependent Relation

Large-scale clusters are often built with over-provisioned service resources, so as to satisfy the huge demand raised by enormous users in cloud environments. By estimating the resource demand of workloads, an on-demand resource provisioning method can be realized in these clusters, thus improving the energy efficiency. However, to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS), the resource demand of workload should be accurately estimated so as to provide suitable resources. Many statistical approaches estimate actual resource demand based on some workload features. But the relations between actual resource demand and workload features are generally obscure, and it's a big challenge to gain an accurate estimation under an obscure relation. In this paper, by considering a cluster as a queueing system, we construct a linearly dependent relation between resource demand and multiple feature combinations. The linearly dependent relation is inconstant due to its variable coefficients. Then, to ascertain specific relations which match actual situations, we design a Basic Linear regression (BL) algorithm. BL can obtain the optimal values for these coefficients, thus determining the inconstant relation to specific ones. Finally, we propose a Constructed Linear regression (CL) approach to estimate actual resource demands. CL forms a two-layer neural network by using several processes of BL as the neurons. To evaluate CL, we realize an On-Demand Resource Provisioning (ODRP) method in a typical power-aware cluster. Several evaluation metrics are proposed for conducting extensive experiments. The experimental results show that CL is effective to make accurate estimations.