Cloud computing drives innovation but also poses significant environmental challenges due to its high-energy consumption and carbon emissions. Data centers account for 2-4% of global energy usage, and the ICT sector's share of electricity consumption is projected to reach 40% by 2040. As the goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 becomes increasingly urgent, there is a growing need for more efficient and transparent solutions, particularly for private cloud infrastructures, which are utilized by 87% of organizations, despite the dominance of public-cloud systems. This study evaluates the MAIZX framework, designed to optimize cloud operations and reduce carbon footprint by dynamically ranking resources, including data centers, edge computing nodes, and multi-cloud environments, based on real-time and forecasted carbon intensity, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), and energy consumption. Leveraging a flexible ranking algorithm, MAIZX achieved an 85.68% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to baseline hypervisor operations. Tested across geographically distributed data centers, the framework demonstrates scalability and effectiveness, directly interfacing with hypervisors to optimize workloads in private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. MAIZX integrates real-time data on carbon intensity, power consumption, and carbon footprint, as well as forecasted values, into cloud management, providing a robust tool for enhancing climate performance potential while maintaining operational efficiency.
This paper is about optimally controlling skill-based queueing systems such as data centers, cloud computing networks, and service systems. By means of a case study using a real-world data set, we investigate the practical implementation of a recently developed reinforcement learning algorithm for optimal customer routing. Our experiments show that the algorithm efficiently learns and adapts to changing environments and outperforms static benchmark policies, indicating its potential for live implementation. We also augment the real-world applicability of this algorithm by introducing a new heuristic routing rule to reduce delays. Moreover, we show that the algorithm can optimize for multiple objectives: next to payoff maximization, secondary objectives such as server load fairness and customer waiting time reduction can be incorporated. Tuning parameters are used for balancing inherent performance trade--offs. Lastly, we investigate the sensitivity to estimation errors and parameter tuning, providing valuable insights for implementing adaptive routing algorithms in complex real-world queueing systems.
Aiming at the critical role of SSD health state prediction in data reliability assurance, this study proposes a hybrid BiGRU-MHA model that incorporates a multi-head attention mechanism to enhance the accuracy and stability of storage device health classification. The model innovatively integrates temporal feature extraction and key information focusing capabilities. Specifically, it leverages the bidirectional timing modeling advantages of the BiGRU network to capture both forward and backward dependencies of SSD degradation features. Simultaneously, the multi-head attention mechanism dynamically assigns feature weights, improving the model's sensitivity to critical health indicators. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves classification accuracies of 92.70% on the training set and 92.44% on the test set, with a minimal performance gap of only 0.26%, demonstrating excellent generalization ability. Further analysis using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve shows an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.94 on the test set, confirming the model's robust binary classification performance. This work not only presents a new technical approach for SSD health prediction but also addresses the generalization bottleneck of traditional models, offering a verifiable method with practical value for preventive maintenance of industrial-grade storage systems. The results show the model can significantly reduce data loss risks by providing early failure warnings and help optimize maintenance costs, supporting intelligent decision-making in building reliable storage systems for cloud computing data centers and edge storage environments.
Cloud computing has made storing and accessing data easier but keeping it secure is a big challenge nowadays. Traditional methods of ensuring data may not be strong enough in the future when powerful quantum computers become available. To solve this problem, this study uses quantum cryptography to protect data in the cloud environment. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) creates secure keys by sending information using quantum particles like photons. Specifically, we use the BB84 protocol, a simple and reliable way to make secure keys that cannot be stolen without detection. To protect the data, we use the Quantum One Time pad (QOTP) for encryption and decryption, ensuring the data stays completely private. This study shows how these Quantum methods can be applied in cloud systems to provide a strong defense against hackers, even if they have access to quantum computers. The combination of QKD, BB84, and QOTP creates a safe and reliable way to keep data secure when it is stored or shared in the cloud. Using quantum cryptography, this paper provides a way to ensure data security now and in the future, making cloud computing safer for everyone to store their data securely and safely.
Hybrid parallelism techniques are essential for efficiently training large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, current automatic parallel planning frameworks often overlook the simultaneous consideration of node heterogeneity and dynamic network topology changes, limiting their effectiveness in practical applications. In this paper, we address these limitations by modeling heterogeneous nodes within dynamically changing network environments and leveraging simulation-based strategies to determine optimal parallel configurations. Our approach enables fine-grained workload allocation tailored for heterogeneous nodes and complex network scenarios, achieving performance competitive with state-of-the-art methods under regular and stable network conditions. Additionally, we introduce a strategy pruning technique to rapidly discard infeasible parallel configurations, substantially reducing the search space and accelerating the search process through parallel execution within the simulator. Preliminary evaluations confirm that our method notably enhances training performance on heterogeneous nodes and demonstrates improved adaptability in complex, dynamic scenarios such as cloud computing environments.
Allocation of goods and services often involves both stochastic supply and stochastic demand. Motivated by applications such as cloud computing, gig platforms, and blockchain auctions, we study the design of optimal selling mechanisms in an environment where buyers with private valuations arrive stochastically and are assigned goods that also arrive stochastically, and either buyers or goods can be held in a queue at costs until allocation. The optimal mechanism dynamically leverages competitive pressure across time by managing the queue of buyers and inventory of goods, using reserve prices that increase with the number of buyers in the queue and decrease with the number of items in inventory, and an auction to allocate the goods.
Anomalies are common in network system monitoring. When manifested as network threats to be mitigated, service outages to be prevented, and security risks to be ameliorated, detecting such anomalous network behaviors becomes of great importance. However, the growing scale and complexity of the mobile communication networks, as well as the ever-increasing amount and dimensionality of the network surveillance data, make it extremely difficult to monitor a mobile network and discover abnormal network behaviors. Recent advances in machine learning allow for obtaining near-optimal solutions to complicated decision-making problems with many sources of uncertainty that cannot be accurately characterized by traditional mathematical models. However, most machine learning algorithms are centralized, which renders them inapplicable to a large-scale distributed wireless networks with tens of millions of mobile devices. In this article, we present fog intelligence, a distributed machine learning architecture that enables intelligent wireless network management. It preserves the advantage of both edge processing and centralized cloud computing. In addition, the proposed architecture is scalable, privacy-preserving, and well suited for intelligent management of a distributed wireless network.
This study investigates the multifaceted factors influencing wildfire risk in Iran, focusing on the interplay between climatic conditions and human activities. Utilizing advanced remote sensing, geospatial information system (GIS) processing techniques such as cloud computing, and machine learning algorithms, this research analyzed the impact of climatic parameters, topographic features, and human-related factors on wildfire susceptibility assessment and prediction in Iran. Multiple scenarios were developed for this purpose based on the data sampling strategy. The findings revealed that climatic elements such as soil moisture, temperature, and humidity significantly contribute to wildfire susceptibility, while human activities-particularly population density and proximity to powerlines-also played a crucial role. Furthermore, the seasonal impact of each parameter was separately assessed during warm and cold seasons. The results indicated that human-related factors, rather than climatic variables, had a more prominent influence during the seasonal analyses. This research provided new insights into wildfire dynamics in Iran by generating high-resolution wildfire susceptibility maps using advanced machine learning classifiers. The generated maps identified high risk areas, particularly in the central Zagros region, the northeastern Hyrcanian Forest, and the northern Arasbaran forest, highlighting the urgent need for effective fire management strategies.
Cost-aware Dynamic Workflow Scheduling (CADWS) is a key challenge in cloud computing, focusing on devising an effective scheduling policy to efficiently schedule dynamically arriving workflow tasks, represented as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG), to suitable virtual machines (VMs). Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been widely employed for automated scheduling policy design. However, the performance of DRL is heavily influenced by the design of the problem-tailored policy network and is highly sensitive to hyperparameters and the design of reward feedback. Considering the above-mentioned issues, this study proposes a novel DRL method combining Graph Attention Networks-based policy network and Evolution Strategy, referred to as GATES. The contributions of GATES are summarized as follows: (1) GATES can capture the impact of current task scheduling on subsequent tasks by learning the topological relationships between tasks in a DAG. (2) GATES can assess the importance of each VM to the ready task, enabling it to adapt to dynamically changing VM resources. (3) Utilizing Evolution Strategy's robustness, exploratory nature, and tolerance for delayed rewards, GATES achieves stable policy learning in CADWS. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed GATES in CADWS, outperforming several state-of-the-art algorithms. The source code is available at: https://github.com/YaShen998/GATES.
With the rapid development of cloud computing systems and the increasing complexity of their infrastructure, intelligent mechanisms to detect and mitigate failures in real time are becoming increasingly important. Traditional methods of failure detection are often difficult to cope with the scale and dynamics of modern cloud environments. In this study, we propose a novel AI framework based on Massive Language Model (LLM) for intelligent fault detection and self-healing mechanisms in cloud systems. The model combines existing machine learning fault detection algorithms with LLM's natural language understanding capabilities to process and parse system logs, error reports, and real-time data streams through semantic context. The method adopts a multi-level architecture, combined with supervised learning for fault classification and unsupervised learning for anomaly detection, so that the system can predict potential failures before they occur and automatically trigger the self-healing mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed model is significantly better than the traditional fault detection system in terms of fault detection accuracy, system downtime reduction and recovery speed.
In the age of cloud computing, data privacy protection has become a major challenge, especially when sharing sensitive data across cloud environments. However, how to optimize collaboration across cloud environments remains an unresolved problem. In this paper, we combine federated learning with large-scale language models to optimize the collaborative mechanism of AI systems. Based on the existing federated learning framework, we introduce a cross-cloud architecture in which federated learning works by aggregating model updates from decentralized nodes without exposing the original data. At the same time, combined with large-scale language models, its powerful context and semantic understanding capabilities are used to improve model training efficiency and decision-making ability. We've further innovated by introducing a secure communication layer to ensure the privacy and integrity of model updates and training data. The model enables continuous model adaptation and fine-tuning across different cloud environments while protecting sensitive data. Experimental results show that the proposed method is significantly better than the traditional federated learning model in terms of accuracy, convergence speed and data privacy protection.
In cloud services, virtual machine (VM) scheduling is a typical Online Dynamic Multidimensional Bin Packing (ODMBP) problem, characterized by large-scale complexity and fluctuating demands. Traditional optimization methods struggle to adapt to real-time changes, domain-expert-designed heuristic approaches suffer from rigid strategies, and existing learning-based methods often lack generalizability and interpretability. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a hierarchical language agent framework named MiCo, which provides a large language model (LLM)-driven heuristic design paradigm for solving ODMBP. Specifically, ODMBP is formulated as a Semi-Markov Decision Process with Options (SMDP-Option), enabling dynamic scheduling through a two-stage architecture, i.e., Option Miner and Option Composer. Option Miner utilizes LLMs to discover diverse and useful non-context-aware strategies by interacting with constructed environments. Option Composer employs LLMs to discover a composing strategy that integrates the non-context-aware strategies with the contextual ones. Extensive experiments on real-world enterprise datasets demonstrate that MiCo achieves a 96.9\% competitive ratio in large-scale scenarios involving more than 10,000 virtual machines. It maintains high performance even under nonstationary request flows and diverse configurations, thus validating its effectiveness in complex and large-scale cloud environments.
Cloud security concerns have been greatly realized in recent years due to the increase of complicated threats in the computing world. Many traditional solutions do not work well in real-time to detect or prevent more complex threats. Artificial intelligence is today regarded as a revolution in determining a protection plan for cloud data architecture through machine learning, statistical visualization of computing infrastructure, and detection of security breaches followed by counteraction. These AI-enabled systems make work easier as more network activities are scrutinized, and any anomalous behavior that might be a precursor to a more serious breach is prevented. This paper examines ways AI can enhance cloud security by applying predictive analytics, behavior-based security threat detection, and AI-stirring encryption. It also outlines the problems of the previous security models and how AI overcomes them. For a similar reason, issues like data privacy, biases in the AI model, and regulatory compliance are also covered. So, AI improves the protection of cloud computing contexts; however, more efforts are needed in the subsequent phases to extend the technology's reliability, modularity, and ethical aspects. This means that AI can be blended with other new computing technologies, including blockchain, to improve security frameworks further. The paper discusses the current trends in securing cloud data architecture using AI and presents further research and application directions.
Solar sensor-based monitoring systems have become a crucial agricultural innovation, advancing farm management and animal welfare through integrating sensor technology, Internet-of-Things, and edge and cloud computing. However, the resilience of these systems to cyber-attacks and their adaptability to dynamic and constrained energy supplies remain largely unexplored. To address these challenges, we propose a sustainable smart farm network designed to maintain high-quality animal monitoring under various cyber and adversarial threats, as well as fluctuating energy conditions. Our approach utilizes deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to devise optimal policies that maximize both monitoring effectiveness and energy efficiency. To overcome DRL's inherent challenge of slow convergence, we integrate transfer learning (TL) and decision theory (DT) to accelerate the learning process. By incorporating DT-guided strategies, we optimize monitoring quality and energy sustainability, significantly reducing training time while achieving comparable performance rewards. Our experimental results prove that DT-guided DRL outperforms TL-enhanced DRL models, improving system performance and reducing training runtime by 47.5%.
Cloud computing environments demand dynamic and efficient resource management to ensure optimal performance, reduced energy consumption, and adherence to Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This paper presents a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based approach for Virtual Machine (VM) placement and consolidation, aiming to minimize power usage while maintaining QoS constraints. The proposed method dynamically adjusts VM allocation based on real-time workload variations, outperforming traditional heuristics such as First Fit Decreasing (FFD) and Best Fit Decreasing (BFD). Experimental results show notable reductions in energy consumption, VM migrations, SLA violation rates, and execution time. A correlation heatmap further illustrates strong relationships among these key performance indicators, confirming the effectiveness of our approach in optimizing cloud resource utilization.
Distributed estimation in interconnected systems has gained increasing attention due to its relevance in diverse applications such as sensor networks, autonomous vehicles, and cloud computing. In real practice, the sensor network may suffer from communication and/or sensor failures. This might be due to cyber-attacks, faults, or environmental conditions. Distributed estimation resilient to such conditions is the topic of this paper. By representing the sensor network as a graph and exploiting its inherent structural properties, we introduce novel techniques that enhance the robustness of distributed estimators. As compared to the literature, the proposed estimator (i) relaxes the network connectivity of most existing single time-scale estimators and (ii) reduces the communication load of the existing double time-scale estimators by avoiding the inner consensus loop. On the other hand, the sensors might be subject to faults or attacks, resulting in biased measurements. Removing these sensor data may result in observability loss. Therefore, we propose resilient design on the definitions of $q$-node-connectivity and $q$-link-connectivity, which capture robust strong-connectivity under link or sensor node failure. By proper design of the sensor network, we prove Schur stability of the proposed distributed estimation protocol under failure of up to $q$ sensors or $q$ communication links.
A decision tree is an easy-to-understand tool that has been widely used for classification tasks. On the one hand, due to privacy concerns, there has been an urgent need to create privacy-preserving classifiers that conceal the user's input from the classifier. On the other hand, with the rise of cloud computing, data owners are keen to reduce risk by outsourcing their model, but want security guarantees that third parties cannot steal their decision tree model. To address these issues, Joye and Salehi introduced a theoretical protocol that efficiently evaluates decision trees while maintaining privacy by leveraging their comparison protocol that is resistant to timing attacks. However, their approach was not only inefficient but also prone to side-channel attacks. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new decision tree inference protocol in which the model is shared and evaluated among multiple entities. We partition our decision tree model by each level to be stored in a new entity we refer to as a "level-site." Utilizing this approach, we were able to gain improved average run time for classifier evaluation for a non-complete tree, while also having strong mitigations against side-channel attacks.
As cloud computing continues to evolve, the adoption of multi-NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architecture by cloud service providers has introduced new challenges in virtual machine (VM) scheduling. To address these challenges and more accurately reflect the complexities faced by modern cloud environments, we introduce the Dynamic VM Allocation problem in Multi-NUMA PM (DVAMP). We formally define both offline and online versions of DVAMP as mixed-integer linear programming problems, providing a rigorous mathematical foundation for analysis. A tight performance bound for greedy online algorithms is derived, offering insights into the worst-case optimality gap as a function of the number of physical machines and VM lifetime variability. To address the challenges posed by DVAMP, we propose SPANE (Symmetry-Preserving Architecture for Multi-NUMA Environments), a novel deep reinforcement learning approach that exploits the problem's inherent symmetries. SPANE produces invariant results under arbitrary permutations of physical machine states, enhancing learning efficiency and solution quality. Extensive experiments conducted on the Huawei-East-1 dataset demonstrate that SPANE outperforms existing baselines, reducing average VM wait time by 45%. Our work contributes to the field of cloud resource management by providing both theoretical insights and practical solutions for VM scheduling in multi-NUMA environments, addressing a critical gap in the literature and offering improved performance for real-world cloud systems.
Serverless architectures, particularly the Function as a Service (FaaS) model, have become a cornerstone of modern cloud computing due to their ability to simplify resource management and enhance application deployment agility. However, a significant challenge remains: the cold start problem. This phenomenon occurs when an idle FaaS function is invoked, requiring a full initialization process, which increases latency and degrades user experience. Existing solutions for cold start mitigation are limited in terms of invocation pattern generalization and implementation complexity. In this study, we propose an innovative approach leveraging Transformer models to mitigate the impact of cold starts in FaaS architectures. Our solution excels in accurately modeling function initialization delays and optimizing serverless system performance. Experimental evaluation using a public dataset provided by Azure demonstrates a significant reduction in cold start times, reaching up to 79\% compared to conventional methods.
With the rapid expansion of cloud computing applications, optimizing resource allocation has become crucial for improving system performance and cost efficiency. This paper proposes an intelligent resource allocation algorithm that leverages deep learning (LSTM) for demand prediction and reinforcement learning (DQN) for dynamic scheduling. By accurately forecasting computing resource demands and enabling real-time adjustments, the proposed system enhances resource utilization by 32.5%, reduces average response time by 43.3%, and lowers operational costs by 26.6%. Experimental results in a production cloud environment confirm that the method significantly improves efficiency while maintaining high service quality. This study provides a scalable and effective solution for intelligent cloud resource management, offering valuable insights for future cloud optimization strategies.