Cloud Infrastructure Utilization

key advantage of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds is providing users on-demand access to resources. However, to provide on-demand access, cloud providers must either significantly overprovision their infrastructure (and pay a high price for operating resources with low utilization) or reject a large proportion of user requests (in which case the access is no longer on-demand). At the same time, not all users require truly on-demand access to resources. Many applications and workflows are designed for recoverable systems where interruptions in service are expected. We propose a cloud infrastructure that combines on-demand allocation of resources with opportunistic provisioning of cycles from idle cloud nodes to other processes.