Performance Modeling and Analysis of the Booting Process in a Transparent Computing Environment

In a transparent computing environment, clients load their Operating Systems (OSes) from a remote central server, thus the boot time of clients is a significant performance metric for customers. With the rapid evolution of systems based on transparent computing, an in-depth study on the performance of the booting process in it is urgently required. This paper studies the boot performance of clients in a transparent computing environment for a workload associated with the booting process of clients. To address the performance issues, we propose and solve a closed queuing network model, which is employed to evaluate and predict the boot performance of the system with various hardware configurations, using the obtained workload characteristics. The results from the model are consonant with the actual results measured in our experiments. And then we employ the model to predict and analyze the boot performance.