Over the past years,
real-time technologies, traditionally developed for safety-critical
systems, have been applied within new application domains, including
consumer electronics (e.g. cellular phones, PDAs), multimedia
(e.g. video servers, VoIP gateways), telecommunication networks and
others. Recently, Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs)
are moving towards a new generation of business models for service
provisioning, where connectivity will represent, for users, only the
basic point of access to an infinity of online services. The
widespread availability of high-speed network connections puts the
foundations of new paradigms of ICT usage and software development,
where more and more of the resources needed by users are provisioned
remotely. In the Internet of the Cloud Computing era, distributed
computing is likely to become much more widespread than today, not
only for activities related to batch processing and storage, but also
for interactive and (soft) real-time applications. To achieve the
level of determinism needed to run real-time tasks inside a VM, the
approach envisaged is to use well established real-time scheduling
techniques, and in particular resource reservations, for scheduling
the VMs. The scheduler is a variation of the Constant Bandwidth Server
(CBS) implementing hard reservations. In the workshop, the basic
real-time reservation model is presented and various appliances are
presented, e.g. the integration of the CBS in mainstream Linux,
considerations of application responsiveness and performance
stability, automatic identification of scheduling parameters, adaptive
reservations, scheduling of multi-threaded virtualized applications on
multi-processor systems, feedback-based scheduling and probabilistic
response time guarantees for distributed workflow deployments.