Recently, an increasing number of public cloud vendors added Containers as a Service (CaaS) to their service portfolio. This is an adequate answer to the growing popularity of Docker, a software technology allowing Linux containers to run independently on a host in an isolated environment. As any software can be deployed in a container, the nature of containers differs and thus assorted allocation and orchestration approaches are needed for their effective execution. In this paper, we focus on containers whose execution value for end users varies over time. A baseline and two dynamic allocation algorithms are proposed and compared with the default Docker scheduling algorithm. Experiments show that the proposed approach can increase the total value obtained from a workload up to three times depending on the workload heaviness. It is also demonstrated that the algorithms scale well with the growing number of nodes in a cloud.

This paper presents an energy aware resource allocation approach that benefits from modal nature of hard real-time systems under consideration. The modal nature of considered applications made it possible to decrease the number of active cores consuming high power in certain modes or to switch into core states with lower power consumption, which lead to considerable energy savings while still not violating any of timing constraints. For the considered automotive use case, the number of required cores has been decreased by up to 75% in a particular mode and relatively low amount of data is to be migrated during the mode change. The trade-off between the amount of data to be migrated and energy dissipation in the subsequent state is also analysed.

This paper considers an application of a new variant of a multi-objective flexible job-shop scheduling problem, featuring multisubset selection of manufactured recipes, to a real-world chemical plant. The problem is optimised using a multi-objective genetic algorithm with customised mutation and elitism operators that minimises both the total production time and the produced commodity surplus. The algorithm evaluation is performed with both random and historic manufacturing orders. The latter demonstrated that the proposed system can lead to more than 10 % makespan improvements in comparison with human operators.

Many-core systems are envisioned to fulfill the increased performance demands in several computing domains such as embedded and high performance computing (HPC). The HPC systems are often overloaded to execute a number of dynamically arriving jobs. In overload situations, market-inspired resource allocation heuristics have been found to provide better results in terms of overall profit (value) earned by completing the execution of a number of jobs when compared to various other heuristics. However, the conventional market-inspired heuristics lack the concept of holding low value executing jobs to free the occupied resources to be used by high value arrived jobs in order to maximize the overall profit. In this paper, we propose a market-inspired heuristic that accomplish the aforementioned concept and utilizes design-time profiling results of jobs to facilitate efficient allocation. Additionally, the remaining executions of the held jobs are performed on freed resources at later stages to make some profit out of them. The holding process identifies the appropriate jobs to be put on hold to free the resources and ensures that the loss incurred due to holding is lower than the profit achieved by high value arrived jobs by using the free resources. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves 8% higher savings when compared to existing approaches, which can be a significant amount when dealing in the order of millions of dollars.