Towards optimizing energy consumption in Cloud

The rapid growth in demand for Information Technologies (IT) resources has led to the creation of large-scale data centers. These latter consume an enormous amount of electrical energy, resulting in high operating costs and carbon dioxide emissions. Moreover, modern Cloud computing environments should provide a high quality of service (QoS) for their customers. Thus, energy consumption has become a major concern for the widespread deployment of Cloud data centers. The growing importance for parallel applications in the Cloud introduces significant challenges in reducing energy consumption from hosted servers. With Cloud, customers can transparently access to virtually unlimited resources. The volunteer computing paradigm has become increasingly important, where the saved resources on each personal machine are shared thanks to the will of their customers. Cloud and volunteer paradigms have recently been seen as complementary technologies to better exploit the use of local resources. This paper presents the most well-known research in the literature on the minimization of energy consumption in traditional Cloud computing as well as in the volunteer one. A novel approach, based on searching shortest path in a graph, is also introduced.