Application classification through monitoring and learning of resource consumption patterns

Application awareness is an important factor of efficient resource scheduling. This paper introduces a novel approach for application classification based on the principal component analysis (PCA) and the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classifier. This approach is used to assist scheduling in heterogeneous computing environments. It helps to reduce the dimensionality of the performance feature space and classify applications based on extracted features. The classification considers four dimensions: CPU-intensive, I/O and paging-intensive, network-intensive, and idle. Application class information and the statistical abstracts of the application behavior are learned over historical runs and used to assist multi-dimensional resource scheduling. This paper describes a prototype classifier for application-centric virtual machines. Experimental results show that scheduling decisions made with the assistance of the application class information, improved system throughput by 22.11% on average, for a set of three benchmark applications.