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Towards a Biologically Inspired Soft Switching Approach for Cloud Resource Provisioning

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Abstract

Cloud elasticity augments applications to dynamically adapt to changes in demand by acquiring or releasing computational resources on the fly. Recently, we developed a framework for cloud elasticity utilizing multiple feedback controllers simultaneously, wherein, each controller determines the scaling action with different intensity, and the selection of an appropriate controller is realized with a fuzzy inference system. In this paper, we aim to identify the similarities between cloud elasticity and action selection mechanism in the animal brain. We treat each controller in our previous framework as an action, and propose a novel bioinspired, soft switching approach. The proposed methodology integrates a basal ganglia computational model as an action selection mechanism. Initial experimental results demonstrate the improved potential of the basal ganglia-based approach by enhancing the overall system performance and stability.

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Acknowledgments

The research work carried out in this paper is funded through a PhD scholarship programme provided jointly by SICSA (http://www.sicsa.ac.uk) and the Division of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling. The work is also supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (under Grants 71571076 and 71171087) and the recent EPSRC grant (Ref. EP/I009310/1). Finally, the EPSRC funded ARCHIE-WeSt High Performance Computer (http://www.archie-west.ac.uk, under EPSRC grant no. EP/K000586/1) was used to obtain the simulation results reported in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    Amjad Ullah, Jingpeng Li & Amir Hussain

  2. Department of Design, Manufacture and Engineering Management, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

    Erfu Yang

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  1. Amjad Ullah
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  2. Jingpeng Li
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Correspondence to Amjad Ullah.

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Amjad Ullah, Jingpeng Li, Amir Hussain, and Erfu Yang declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008 (5). Additional informed consent was obtained from all patients for which identifying information is included in this article.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any authors.

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Ullah, A., Li, J., Hussain, A. et al. Towards a Biologically Inspired Soft Switching Approach for Cloud Resource Provisioning. Cogn Comput 8, 992–1005 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-016-9391-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-016-9391-y

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