Biblio

Cloud computing adoption is on the rise. Many organizations have decided to shift their workload to the cloud to benefit from the scalability, resilience, and cost reduction characteristics. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is an emerging computing paradigm that also provides many advantages to mobile users. Mobile devices function on wireless internet connectivity, which entails issues of limited bandwidth and network congestion. Hence, the primary focus of Web applications in MCC is on improving performance by quickly fulfilling customer's requests to improve service satisfaction. This paper investigates a new approach to caching data in these applications using Redis, an in-memory data store, to enhance Quality of Service. We highlight the two implementation approaches of fetching the data of an application either directly from the database or from the cache. Our experimental analysis shows that, based on performance metrics such as response time, throughput, latency, and number of hits, the caching approach achieves better performance by speeding up the data retrieval by up to four times. This improvement is of significant importance in mobile devices considering their limitation of network bandwidth and wireless connectivity.

Software defined systems use virtualization technologies to provide an abstraction of the hardware infrastructure at different layers. Ultimately, the adoption of software defined systems in all cloud infrastructure components will lead to Software Defined Cloud Computing. Nevertheless, virtualization has already been used for years and is a key element of cloud computing. Traditionally, virtual machines are deployed in cloud infrastructure and used to execute applications on common operating systems. New lightweight virtualization technologies, such as containers and unikernels, appeared later to improve resource efficiency and facilitate the decomposition of big monolithic applications into multiple, smaller services. In this work, we present and empirically evaluate four popular unikernel technologies, Docker containers and Docker LinuxKit. We deployed containers both on bare metal and on virtual machines. To fairly evaluate their performance, we created similar applications for unikernels and containers. Additionally, we deployed full-fledged database applications ported on both virtualization technologies. Although in bibliography there are a few studies which compare unikernels and containers, in our study for the first time, we provide a comprehensive performance evaluation of clean-slate and legacy unikernels, Docker containers and Docker LinuxKit.

Recent advances in the development of the first generation of quantum computing devices have provided researchers with computational platforms to explore new ideas and reformulate conventional computational codes suitable for a quantum computer. Developers can now implement these reformulations on both quantum simulators and hardware platforms through a cloud computing software environment. For example, the IBM Q Experience provides the direct access to their quantum simulators and quantum computing hardware platforms. However these current access options may not be an optimal environment for developers needing to download and modify the source codes and libraries. This paper focuses on the construction of a Docker container environment with Qiskit source codes and libraries running on a local cloud computing system that can directly access the IBM Q Experience. This prototype container based system allows single user and small project groups to do rapid prototype development, testing and implementation of extreme capability algorithms with more agility and flexibility than can be provided through the IBM Q Experience website. This prototype environment also provides an excellent teaching environment for labs and project assignments within graduate courses in cloud computing and quantum computing. The paper also discusses computer security challenges for expanding this prototype container system to larger groups of quantum computing researchers.