Business-Driven Management of Hybrid IT Infrastructures

With the emergence of the cloud computing paradigm and the continuous search to reduce the cost of running Information Technology (IT) infrastructures, we are currently experiencing an important change in the way these infrastructures are assembled, configured and managed. In this research we consider the problem of managing a hybrid high-performance computing infrastructure whose processing elements are comprised of in-house dedicated machines, virtual machines acquired from cloud computing providers, and remote virtual machines made available by a best-effort peer-to-peer (P2P) grid. Each of these resources has a different cost basis. The applications that run in this hybrid infrastructure are characterised by a utility function: the utility yielded by the completion of an application depends on the time