Semi-Markov Process Based Reliability and Availability Prediction for Volunteer Cloud Systems

Alternative cloud systems that depend on spare resources of volunteer computers are emerging, complementing the conventional data center based clouds. These alternative cloud systems have one characteristic in common - they do not rely on dedicated data centers to provide the cloud services. Delivering reliable cloud services over volatile donated computing resources of volunteer hosts is one of the main challenges in such opportunistic cloud systems that run over scavenged resources. This paper discusses the design of a multi-state semi-Markov process based availability and reliability prediction model for nodes in volunteer cloud computing systems. It also presents the implementation and integration of the model in a real volunteer cloud system, cuCloud. Moreover, the evaluation and empirical results obtained from the experimentation performed on real cuCloud system is discussed.