Neptune: A Dynamic Resource Allocation and Planning System for a Cluster Computing Utility

We present Neptune - a novel resource management system that dynamically relocates and reconfigures a set of resources among a set of customer domains in a computing utility cluster. The strength and novelty of our system model is in its on-line control mechanism that, subject to policy-based performance objectives, continuously reassigns the resources among the application domains in response to workload changes. Neptune, the resource director, is the component that receives the threshold events, makes decisions based on a pre-defined policy, and executes them through a flexible plan execution framework that communicates with a set of lower level resource managers. The approach described was validated in an 80 server Web-based cluster computing utility.